10

‘Sweet Jane Whorwood’

‘You may freely trust Whorwood in anything that concerns my service, for I have had perfect trial of her friendship to me. I cannot be more confident of any.’

King Charles I to William Hopkins, Master

of Newport Grammar School, 1648

By the early spring of 1648, the prior consolations of life at Carisbrooke had palled markedly. Indeed, as the king watched the rain, whipped by a south-westerly wind off the neighbouring downs, stream over the windows, bringing with it the fusty smell of damp stone, the full desolation of his circumstances became increasingly apparent. The royal coach, shipped so painstakingly from London some months earlier, now lay idle, and the furniture and library, brought from Hampton Court with equal care and consideration, had become little more than the lining of a royal cage. Deprived even of the consolation of his chaplains, the king had been in effect ‘chaplain to himself’ since December, and, with the continued absence of Ashburnham, Berkeley and Legge, came a creeping awareness that neither time nor the balance of political forces were working to his advantage as once they had done. Hitherto, he had been cushioned not only by his status as anointed king and the conviction that Parliament could not govern without him, but by the knowledge that his enemies were divided and the belief that he could escape whenever he chose. Now, however, the visible impatience of Hammond, the increasing traffic of couriers between London and Hammond’s study and, worst of all, the sinister echoes from army headquarters betokening a new unanimity of purpose with Parliament confirmed that royal influence was more marginal than ever.

The feebleness of Charles’ own escape attempt had been highlighted, moreover, by the brilliant execution of his son’s removal from St James’s Palace the following month. All three of the royal children remaining in England – James, Duke of York, Henry, Duke of Gloucester and the Princess Elizabeth – had been detained there in the care of the Earl of Northumberland. But on the evening of Friday, 21 April, agents of the émigré English court in Holland engineered the liberation the 14-year-old Duke of York with a simplicity, finesse and efficiency that could not have contrasted more starkly with the farce that had been played out at Charles’ bedchamber window. Under cover of a game of hide and seek, the prince had made his way through an outer door in the palace’s park, where Colonel Joseph Bamfield was waiting for him. After a brief stop at the house of a certain Anne Murray, where he was dressed in girl’s clothes, James then made his way down the Thames with Bamfield in a skiff, to a boat bound for Holland.

The news of the prince’s escape came, of course, as no small relief to his father. But in deepening his desire to be gone from Carisbrooke, it augmented his private sense of failure and pessimism. Calling his servants together not long afterwards to tell them that there was ‘no remedy but patience’, he also betrayed the same underlying sense of resignation to Abraham Dowcett. ‘Servant,’ he confided, ‘you now see by Experience that my Condition is much wors then you thought it would have beene, but yet it is not so ill as I expect it will be.’ Some small satisfaction, it is true, could be gleaned from a gentle goading of his captors. According to the Mercurius Elencticus, for instance, he did not forego the opportunity to remind Hammond that the king might one day have power of life and death over him. But this did not prevent the Governor from searching his prisoner’s desk for secret papers in late April – an act wholly inconceivable only five or six weeks earlier. Walking in the grounds at a time when the weather suddenly turned chilly, Charles had dispatched Herbert to his room to fetch a cloak, with the result that Hammond was discovered red-handed, accompanied by John Reading, the Page of the Backstairs, who had presumably let him in. Far from embarrassing the Governor, however, this particular incident merely preceded a decision to move Charles to the north side of the castle, adjacent to the walls, and marked only the beginning of Hammond’s more direct intervention in the king’s everyday affairs, as he now spent hours outside the royal bedchamber in a personal vigil.

Why Hammond had conducted his search remains unclear, though Thomas Wagstaffe, one of the garrison, later revealed that concern had been raised by the king’s habit of working late into the night, yet continuing to rise early. For this reason, we are told, ‘they diligently serch’d his Chamber, after he was walked out one Morning, and in searching, one lifted up the Hangings, there they found pinn’d up, Sheet by Sheet, within the Hangings, next the Wall, many sheets of this Book’. The book concerned was purportedly Eikon Basilike, which Charles is thought by some to have been writing at this time. But, even if true, the object of Hammond’s search is almost certain to have lain elsewhere, and Herbert’s claim that the Governor was seeking ‘some supposed papers of intelligence from the Queen and correspondency with others’ is only marginally more convincing, for without any assistance from him, much of the royal correspondence was already being effectively intercepted.

In fact, the most plausible answer is probably supplied by Ashburnham’s account, which centres upon the articles of agreement with the Scottish commissioners that Charles was suspected of retaining in his possession. Ashburnham, after being ordered away from the castle at the end of December, had already expressed doubts about the safety of the documents buried in the castle grounds in a lead container, and the Scots, too, had shared his misgivings. As a result, the compromising papers had finally been spirited away to Ashburnham, it seems, ‘to provide for His and their security, by placeing them where they may rest concealed till some seasonable opportunity to make use of them’. But Hammond may also have got wind of Charles’ own copy of the incriminating articles and attempted to intervene, albeit unsuccessfully, as Ashburnham confirmed some time afterwards. ‘Verie happy it was,’ he declared triumphantly, ‘that His Majestie did send them to mee, for within Ten dayes His Cabinet was broken open, and search made for all his writeings, expressly ayming at those papers.’

In any event, the only recourse for Charles henceforth, it seemed, was the shelter of everyday routine and largely ineffectual musings upon the mechanics of escape. Although he refused the services of Parliamentary chaplains, and his subsequent appeals for a congregation for services according to the Prayer Book were turned down, he nevertheless began each day in private devotion, before spending the rest of the morning, if weather permitted, circuiting the castle with Hammond – usually some seven or eight times around the ¼-mile perimeter of the battlements – before retiring to his apartments to read and write letters. Though he was still prone to frustration and low spirits, there remained other consolations of a kind. Not least of all, Charles seems to have developed a new interest in food, notwithstanding the fact that his meals were reduced from twenty to sixteen courses in early March, as a result of economies. Food prices on the Isle of Wight were high, with corn selling at 10s 6d, according to Oglander, and the king’s menu was to be curtailed accordingly. But he enjoyed his meals, and the catering itself remained suitably lavish.

Equally importantly, it was at table that the king became really animated, asking for news of events in various parts of the country, or, when the mood took him, talking ‘of morality, and of passages of other kingdoms of old’. On one occasion, predictably enough, he initiated a discussion ‘touching the prerogative of Kings, what divers had acted, and the successe thereof’, though what followed was neither reverential nor even, for that matter, particularly reverent. For when some of Charles’ attendants saw fit at last to air their own views, we hear that ‘the discourse broke off with a merry jest’. Indeed, whenever talk at table became charged or heated, the king was always inclined to end it with a touch of humour, and a similar latitude was also extended above all to Hammond’s chaplain, young Mr Troughton, who had just come down from university. Charles and Troughton spent many hours, in fact, debating theology – the latter holding forth with all the vigour of the undergraduate he had recently been, the older man exhibiting the kind of wisdom and self-certainty that was characteristic of the don his father had always wanted him to be. But while there was sniping and point-scoring on either side as the pair regularly strolled up and down the royal Presence Chamber after dinner, tussling with each other from prepared positions, at no point was Troughton intimidated or abruptly silenced for his impetuosity – apart, that is, from one occasion, in the middle of an intense exchange, when the king is said to have suddenly unsheathed the sword of one of the officers in the room, only to confer a knighthood on one of the attendants present.

Notwithstanding changes in Charles’ physical appearance, which suggested that the prolonged strain was gradually taking its toll, he seems to have retained not only traces of his mordant wit, but even a dash of that schoolboy humour, which is often underestimated in character studies of the private man. With the dismissal of the royal barber at the end of February, the king refused the services of a Parliamentarian replacement and, in consequence, his hair, which was now thinly streaked with grey, grew so long that he was frequently compared to a hermit. But while he was prone to fits of moodiness, brought on by the prolonged bouts of introspection in which he now indulged more frequently, there were still occasional incidents to lighten the gloom. He was overcome by gales of laughter, for instance, when a visitor from London knelt with such enthusiasm to kiss his hand that he fell flat upon his face, and he exhibited hardly less glee when Colonel Hammond himself, accompanying him on one of their regular excursions around the castle, slipped on the damp battlements – a result, no doubt, of the continually miserable rainy weather – and made a similarly ungracious earthward descent.

Playfully interpreting the incident as a ‘punishment’ for the Governor’s ‘incivility’ to William Hopkins’ wife and his ‘equivocating to me’, there was little apparent malice in the king’s amusement. Yet Herbert suggests that Hammond forfeited the king’s good opinion of him ‘by that uncomly Act’ of searching his apartments, and Royalist propaganda was declaring by now that Charles was actually subject on occasion to physical intimidation at his captor’s hands. One account, for example, related how Hammond ‘in the dead of night came and knockt at his Majesties doore and when the King all amazed, demanded who was there, he told him it was he and he must come in’. When, more-over, ‘his Majestie desired him to put of the business till the morrow’, the Governor is said to have become insistent, as the rest of the account makes clear:

[B]ut he replied he neither could nor would, and that if he opened not the doore, he would break it open, whereupon the meeke Prince presently arose, and casting his cloake about him, admitted him; being in he told him, he had an order from the Houses, to search his Cabinet for letters, whereupon his Majestie opening his Cabinet, took thence two letters, and left him to view the rest, which the Traytor perceiving, demanded them also, the king told him he should not have them, and with that word threw them into the fire; when Hammond indeavouring to gaine them, the King tript up his heeles, and laid him on the fire also, whereupon the villaine bauld out for aide, when presently came in a Ruffian and laid hands on the King in such a rude manner, as he would have strangled him, and striving with him pusht his face upon the hilts of Hammonds sword, whereby it was extreamly bruised, and attempting him further, hit him also against the Pommell of a chaire, whereby his Majesties eye is black and blew, but maugre the utmost of the two devils, the letters were burnt, and Hammond rising up, threatened his Majestie in very approbrious language.

Lord Clarendon, it is true, considered the incident ‘somewhat improbable’, and Hammond himself vigorously repudiated the charges against him in an indignant letter to the Speaker dated 22 April:

And considering the strange Reports which have been without the least ground, raised, and as I understand, still continued concerning my Barbarous usage of the King, it may not be unnecessary for me to say to you in my behalf, and I hope among all modest men, the commonsense of this so confident report will in this pleade my excuse, that I have, to the height of my power, given the King upon all occasions, all possible respects answerable to the duty I owe to his person, and the great trust you have pleased to repose in me, and truly, if otherwise, I should be more unworthy than those wicked men who raised this report would make me.

When it was suggested elsewhere, moreover, that the king had given Hammond ‘a box on the ear’ during the same incident and that the Governor had retaliated with blows of his own, there was even greater improbability involved. For, if Charles was perfectly capable of stretching his captor’s patience, there was little to be gained from resorting to violence, and Hammond was far too calculating a character to play so easily into his enemies’ hands. On 12 April, a Royalist pamphlet entitled ‘The Fatal Blow’ described how ‘Gaoler Hammond’ – ‘notwithstanding his most solemn protestations unto his Majesty to treat him well’ – had ‘impiously and traitorously wounded’ the king. But only a day later, it seems, the king was ‘very merry at play’ with Hammond upon a bowling green that the Governor had built especially for his recreation.

While Charles occasionally bemoaned inferior wine and found his bed linen not overly clean, every possible effort to cater for his comfort continued to be made in other areas. A miniature golf course, for example, was created for the king’s entertainment within the outer defences of the castle, in one corner of which a little summer house was built where he could take shelter from the persistent rain, since the summer of 1648 would ultimately prove the wettest for decades. ‘From Mayday till the 15th of September,’ wrote Sir John Oglander, ‘we had scarce three dry days together … His Majesty asked me whether that weather was usual in our Island. I told him that in this 40 years I never knew the like before.’ But in spite of the elements, the new structure served its purpose more than adequately. Described somewhat extravagantly in one account as a ‘banqueting house’, Herbert probably hit the mark rather more accurately by deeming it ‘a pretty shed … to rest in, & retyre when the weather was unseasonable’, though by mid-July gilders and painters were being employed by Hammond to apply the finishing touches. The king was more than happy with the standard of workmanship, for as one newsletter reported:

His Majesty often views the workmen, asketh some questions but seldom finds fault with any thing they doe, but saith, that such and such things are well.

From his summer house, too, Charles was able to watch the sea and the shipping, and take in the soft line of green hills which were not visible from his new room, while his bowling green, built at Hammond’s specific command on the parade ground to the west of the castle, just inside the outer defences beyond the curtain wall, was considered ‘scarce to be equalled’. Work began in February, and on 18 March a news-sheet reported how the ‘Bowling Alley’, which Charles once again inspected regularly during its construction, ‘will be a gallant one when finished’. On 10 April, furthermore, the king was enjoying his first afternoon’s play in the company of Thomas Herbert, Anthony Mildmay, Major Oliver Cromwell (a nephew of the lieutenant-general, who was in charge of one of the castle’s infantry companies and had been appointed a Groom of the Bedchamber and Cupbearer to his Majesty in February) and indeed Hammond himself. Such was Charles’ exuberance during the game, it seems, that, according to at least one hostile news-sheet, he was ‘very free in his expressions with the Governour, and others’, baiting his opponents in ‘merrie discourse’, and in particular expressing ‘no good opinion of the Scottish nation’.

Credible or otherwise, the same report does, however, suggest that Charles’ bowling green chatter was altogether more circumspect where his future political options were concerned:

When he discourses of the conditions and state of things, and what is or may be done, His Majesty speaks extraordinarily warily, and with a great deal of discretion, and still gives solid and well grounded reasons for what he speaks, and it is verily supposed His Majesty is in great hopes that he shall be admitted to come to His Parliament, for sometimes he expresses as much: Also it is thought, that this conceit of His is the cause that he is so much merrier than he formerly hath been. Also, His Majestie enquires much after the proceedings of the Parliament of Scotland, and seems greatly to mislike the Prevalencie of the Clergie under the Presbyteriall Government, as if they carried with them a more uncontrouled and unlimited jurisdiction, then was lately exercised by the Prelates of England.

That Charles should have said even this much in the company of a nephew of Oliver Cromwell and the man who was responsible for his captivity may be questionable, particularly when the specific source for the report remains unknown. But it was consistent with the king’s general tendency to be both over-confident and over-talkative in high spirits, and to this extent retains a ring of truth.

More significantly still, it may bear out his underlying trust in the good intentions of the man who had made the game possible in the first place. Though he called down ‘a pox’ upon the Governor on one occasion, and wrote to William Hopkins on 21 August that ‘the devil cannot outgoe him nether in Malice nor Cunning’, he knew too that his jailer was a man under pressure: stricken by divided loyalties, averse to the shifty dealings of political negotiation and only inclined ultimately to do what his duty demanded. More soldier than diplomat, it was equally true that if Hammond had grown less sympathetic to the king’s behaviour, he had nevertheless maintained his bearing – occasionally under no small provocation – and foregone the opportunity to exploit his position of potential dominance. For the army’s Independents, indeed, he was ‘not violent Inowgh’, and if Royalists saw fit to denounce him as a ‘hellhound’, ‘that baboon’ and ‘that ape-fac’d blood-monger’, his actions consistently suggested otherwise.

Hammond, therefore, was an honourable man, worthy at the very least of the king’s grudging respect, if not his gratitude. For ultimately the chasm between the two men concerned methods rather than principles, insofar that Charles would always maintain that the end justified the means in a way that Hammond could never accept. Unsure of his ground and out of place in a time of extreme political and religious passion, the Governor could, in fact, neither comprehend nor countenance the kind of double-dealing that came so naturally to his king, immersed as he was by background, rank and circumstance in tortuous ploys and subterfuge. It was this – and a war-weary soldier’s wish for a final, honest settlement, perhaps – that explains Hammond’s occasional bursts of irritability, though even he could appreciate ultimately that the king was not, in essence, a vindictive man. In the wake of his search of the royal bedchamber, for example, Hammond learnt how Herbert had raged against the page who had admitted him, only for the young man to be spared dismissal by the king himself who, ‘of his goodness’, was prepared to pass the matter by ‘without either reproaching the Governour, or taking notice thereof’.

The king, in any case, seems to have been less preoccupied with baiting his captors than with his books, his writing and, to a lesser degree, the steady trickle of visitors who still came to him at Carisbrooke. For some still arrived to be touched for the ‘King’s Evil’, others merely to gawk as God’s anointed walked the battlements or played at bowls. The doggerel-poet John Taylor, for example, who visited the Isle of Wight during August, described several cases of the king’s faith-healing activities, although one newsletter had predicted on 8 May that, with the hot weather coming on, general access to the king for this purpose might have to be stopped, in order to protect his own health. More pressing still in this regard, however, were the security concerns, which continued to nag the authorities. Early in July, for example, Lord Rich had received a permit to visit the king to be touched for ‘the Evil’, though Walter Frost, secretary of the Derby House Committee, wrote privately on 6 July to warn Hammond that Rich’s real business was to consult the king about a Royalist rising in Surrey.

Yet in spite of his closer confinement since January, the single loophole of Charles’ supposed healing powers still provided him with some direct access to his subjects. Hopeful sufferers continued, indeed, to make their way to Newport and the surrounding villages from various parts of the country with the intention of talking their way into Carisbrooke by sheer importunity and waylaying him as he came down to a meal or took his exercise. It was no small irony either that, in his ambivalent position as king and prisoner, Charles now felt under an especially strong obligation to receive them, though not all his visitors were so welcome. Obadiah Sedgewick, for example, a ponderously earnest army chaplain, who had gained notoriety the year before by predicting the end of the world within the fortnight, not only gained access to the king but insisted that he read his recently published Leaves on the Tree of Life, droning on into the late hours about this 120-page exposition of a single, markedly abstruse verse of the bible. Only, in fact, when the king tactfully suggested that Sedgewick might benefit from some well-earned sleep did the chaplain finally retire to bed, fondly satisfied that his dogged exegesis of Revelations 22:2 had been well received.

Yet, notwithstanding the chaplain’s dreary tome, Charles maintained his devotion to more uplifting reading of other kinds. Indeed, since his enemies had left him, as he freely admitted, ‘but little of life, and onely the husk and shell’, he maintained his spirits by reading widely and took special consolation, predictably perhaps, not only from the Bible, but from Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, which he kept by him, and devotional works, such as Bishop Andrewes’ Sermons, Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, George Sandys’ Paraphrases on the Psalms of David and George Herbert’s Divine Poems. ‘Dum spiro spero’, he poignantly inscribed in a number of his books: ‘While I breathe, I hope’. There were numerous other fly-leaf scribblings, including quotes from Claudian, relating to what Herbert described as ‘the Levelling and Anti-monarchik spirits’ which predominated at the time, as well as the following Latin distich, affirming that while it is easy to despise life in times of adversity, the man who acts bravely is also able to endure unhappiness:

Rebus in adversis facile est contemnare vitam:

Fortiter ille facit qui miser esse potest.

And there was lighter fare, too, including Spenser’s Fairie Queene, Tasso’s Godfrey of Bulloigne, Shakespeare’s plays – which Charles annotated – and Sir John Harrington’s translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Certainly, the king’s library at Carisbrooke could not have been inconsiderable, for Herbert was placed in charge of his books, ‘of which the king had a catalogue, and from time to time had brought unto him, such as he was pleased to call for’. A collection of ‘Printed Bookes from London’ appears to have arrived in mid-April, while Herbert seems to have drawn, too, upon Sir John Oglander’s library at Nunwell, since there is a note of the purchase by him of four of Oglander’s volumes. There were attempts on other occasions at translation on the king’s behalf – of which he had always been fond – including De Juramento by Robert Sanderson, whom Parliament had just deprived of the Regius Professorship of Theology at Oxford. Plainly, if Charles could not help his supporters practically, he could at least recognise their sacrifices by the most effective token gestures available to him, which also included reading their propaganda – much of which continued to be smuggled into him, notwithstanding the creation in January 1648 of a Commons committee to suppress all ‘unlicensed and scandalous pamphlets’. Usually measuring about 7in x 5in, contemporary news-sheets were a mass of closely printed text and Charles consumed them avidly whenever they came his way.

Whether Charles was actually responsible at this time for penning a full-scale book himself – the so-called Eikon Basilike, pages of which, as we have seen, were allegedly discovered by Hammond during a search of the king’s apartments – remains open to dispute, however. Eventually published shortly after his death, the book became at once a lynchpin of Royalist propaganda, depicting the king, in effect, as a neotype of the crucified Christ – the princely proto-martyr, politically and morally innocent, cruelly butchered at the hands of his subjects. But as early as August 1649, no less a figure than John Milton was attributing authorship to a ‘presumptuous priest’ – most probably Dr John Gauden, Dean of Bocking and later Bishop of Exeter – who, in the poet’s words, had sought to make ‘his King his Bastard Issue Own’. Thenceforward the Suspiria Regalia (‘Sighs of a King’), as it was originally known, became the seedbed of an ongoing controversy, which was compounded by the admission of Sir Thomas Herbert – who, it seems, first acquired the text – that he ‘did not see the King write that book, his Majesty being always private when he writ, and those his servants never coming into the bed-chamber, when the King was private, until he called’.

Yet Herbert remained convinced that his royal master was responsible for the work – not least because the handwriting was ‘so very like’ what he had seen before – and, according to Thomas Wagstaffe, Hammond, too, provided further testimony connecting the king to it. Going as usual to the king’s room to announce that dinner was ready, it seems that the Governor found him writing on one occasion and lingered behind afterwards to snatch a glimpse of the page, the ink still being wet upon it. What he read was later recognisable as part of Eikon Basilike and quite possibly its final chapter, ‘Meditations upon Death’, which relates to this period of Charles’ life. Mixing biblical and classical allusions with political theory, ecclesiastical history, lessons from antiquity and random musings upon Mary, Queen of Scots, the Gunpowder Plot and the Solemn League and Covenant, this particular section contains none of the prayers found elsewhere in the book. But it remains both resolute in affirming the justice of the king’s stand – ‘We measure not our Cause by our success, but our success by our Cause’ – and ends with the hope that those ‘whom perhaps ignorance without malice, or some error, less than fatal, hath for some time misled … may find the good grace to bethink themselves and recover’.

In all likelihood, the book was probably the result of joint authorship by both Charles and Gauden. The latter’s wife, for example, recalled that sections of his work were at some point read out at Carisbrooke to the king, who ‘did exceedingly approve of them’ and then ‘both corrected and heightened’ the text. Charles had certainly been engaged in literary activity while imprisoned at Holdenby, for Major Huntington and other witnesses reported viewing several of his royal ‘meditations’. It is known, too, that in 1647 the king also asked Bishop Juxon’s help in finding someone to put his ‘loose papers’ into ‘an exact method’. That person, it seems, was Gauden, who, according to his servant William Allen, ‘sat up one whole night to transcribe’ the king’s manuscript before returning it to Carisbrooke, where it was eventually observed by Hammond in March 1648. Bearing on every page, what one nineteenth-century expert considered ‘the peculiar stamp of Charles mind and habit of thought’, the book provides ample testament, at the very least, to the king’s self-image at this time of ordeal.

In imploring God to make his heir ‘an Anchor, or Harbour rather, to these tossed and weather-beaten kingdoms’, there is full recognition likewise on Charles’ behalf that the current troubles have happened for a divinely ordained reason:

Forgive, I beseech thee, my Personal, and my People’s sins; which are so far mine, as I have not improved the power thou gavest me, to thy glory, and my subjects’ good: Thou has now brought me from the glory and freedom of a King, to be a Prisoner to my own Subjects: Justify, O Lord, as to thy over-ruling hand, because in many things I have rebelled against thee.

And there is the same ongoing emphasis upon dignity and decorum in response to provocation that rarely eluded the king, and to which he makes direct reference in the account of his treatment by the Scots at Hull:

[N]o disdain, or emotion of passion transported Me … to do or say anything, unbeseeming My self, or unsuitable to that temper, which, in greatest injuries, I think, best becomes a Christian, as coming nearest to the great example of Christ. And indeed, I desire always more to remember I am a Christian, than a King.

By identification with Job and King David, not to mention the crucified Christ, Charles’ image is, of course, carefully sculpted to emphasise his heroic suffering ‘under the colour of religion’. He is presented, indeed, as a Protestant martyr, not unlike those described by John Foxe in his Acts and Monuments, which the king read while in captivity. Even the book’s eventual frontispiece, for that matter, which depicted its author as a humble, steadfast and triumphant imitator of Christ who cast aside his crown to don a crown of thorns, was plainly intended, as one of its critics put it, ‘the better to stir up the People and vain beholders to pity him’. For Milton, ‘the conceited portraiture before his Book’ had been ‘drawn out to the full measure of a Masquing Scene’ with the sole intention of inveigling ‘fools and silly gazers’. Yet he too, of course, was a practised polemicist of some years’ standing, and his own Eikonoklastes, written in response to the publication of Eikon Basilike, may well have been a ‘work assigned’ by the Council of State, to which he had been appointed around that time as ‘Secretary of Foreign Tongues’.

In the event, Charles himself could not have imagined the future impact of the text as he pondered it from his prison cell in the early spring of 1648. At this juncture, in fact, he was spending more and more of his time contemplating the past and considering the critical events that had brought him to his present condition. On occasion he explained, and sometimes excused, his actions, suggesting, for example, that if he had called Parliament to any place other than London on the eve of the outbreak of war, the consequences might have been quite different. Likewise, he was keen to affirm that when he left Whitehall, he had been driven by shame rather than fear, in order not ‘to prostitute the Majestie of My Place and Person, the safetie of My Wife and Children’. He had passed the Triennial Act of 1641, on the other hand, as a ‘gentle and seasonable Physick might, if well applied, prevent anie distempers from getting anie head’. When his wife left England, he confessed, it was not her going that hurt most, but the ‘scandal of that necessity’.

As his horizons shrank at Carisbrooke, Charles continued, too, to dwell upon the Earl of Strafford’s death some seven years earlier, always struggling with guilt and acknowledging his former servant’s abilities, which ‘might make a prince rather afraid than ashamed to emploie him in the greatest affairs of state’. In allowing his execution, Charles freely admitted, he had chosen what appeared to be the ‘safe’ rather than the ‘just’ course, and in doing so exhibited ‘sinful frailtie’. But if he had made errors, there was at least the hope that his heir would not repeat them. To his eldest son, indeed, he wrote that his current reflections had been set down with the intention of helping him to remedy the kingdom’s distempers and prevent their repetition. The fact that the Prince of Wales had experienced troubles while young might help him eventually, just ‘as trees set in winter then in warmth and serenitie of time’ frequently benefit. Upon his accession, the young man should seek to be Charles ‘le bon’ rather than Charles the Great, discouraging factions, employing his prerogative equitably, and beginning and ending with God alone.

For his absent wife, meanwhile, the king appeared to display less agonising concern than previously. His promise to Prince Rupert in September 1647 that ‘next my children (I saye, Next) I shall haue most care of you’ might well be seen as a deliberate relegation of her in his affection – particularly when the added emphasis of the repetition and capitalisation of ‘Next’ is taken into account – and there was certainly little visible sign of the torment that had accompanied the earlier days of their separation. The comparative coolness was, moreover, mutual, it seems, for he now complained to Silius Titus that while others answered his letters, only Henrietta Maria’s correspondence failed to reach him. It was ‘ill lucke’, he observed on 26 April, ‘that my Wyfes letter should only miscarry, for I haue had answers to all the others, wch went by that Messenger’. Though the king acknowledged that her messages ‘might be betrayd at the Post house’, it is hard to ignore a hint of bitterness in his comment. Nor was this the only observation of its kind, for on 21 July, Charles tersely informed William Hopkins that ‘the freshest Letter I have had from 40 [the queen] was of above 6 Weeks Date’. Of more interest to him, it seems, was the news that ‘50’, i.e. Hammond, ‘fell flat on his back, walking by me upon Wednesday last’.

Across the Channel, to her credit, the queen was continuing her fund-raising efforts in support of the Duke of Hamilton in vain anticipation of a Scottish rescue attempt on her husband’s behalf. But her endeavours were dutiful rather than hopeful, and while Henry Jermyn remained a crutch and sustenance to her, there was no doubt about her straitened circumstances and more general wretchedness. When Madame de Motteville visited Henrietta Maria at her favourite Carmelite convent in the Faubourg St Jacques, where she had gone to pray for the safety of her eldest son, the transformation in her fortunes was apparent. Sitting in a little chamber, writing dispatches, she spoke at length of her anxieties and showed her visitor a small gold drinking-cup – the only valuable she had left. ‘Her nights are more sad than usual,’ reported one of the queen’s remaining attendants, and by the time that Cardinal de Retz met her, she was poorer than ever, tending her 4-year-old daughter, unassisted, in a chilly bedchamber. ‘I would not let the poor child rise today as we have no fire,’ she told the cardinal.

Whether Charles was fully aware of his wife’s predicament remains uncertain, in fact, but the considerable volume of his other correspondence at this time continues to beg the question why more letters were not composed for her benefit. As he admitted at one point to Silius Titus, there was ‘no greater service’ that could be rendered to the crown ‘but to get a letter conveyed to my wife for me, and to take care that I may have the answer returned’. Yet, notwithstanding the continual risk of interception, it was not uncommon for the king to write twice a day to some individuals, and nothing like this scale of effort appears to have been dedicated to maintaining contact with the queen. For 1648 alone, indeed, 159 of his secret letters have survived, and since many of them were cover letters for packets of correspondence, and because Charles burnt all incoming messages and stopped keeping copies, his correspondence that year may well have run to almost 1,000 items. Through secret letters, of course, he was still able to play at the game of kingship, encouraging Royalist resistance and proposing rewards for his followers. But there were also attempts to encourage his children and declare his yearning for them, which were by this time notably absent from his dealings with his wife.

Nor can the king’s inactivity in this regard be attributed wholly to fears of detection, for not only did such apprehensions fail to curb his other correspondence, he refused in the main to accept that his communications had been fundamentally compromised in the first place. ‘I cannot think anyone so great a Devil as to betray me,’ he declared with an almost touching naivety at the very time that Lady Carlisle and Mr Low were readily informing the Derby House Committee of his intentions. His faith in the efficacy of his ciphers and disguised handwriting, not to mention his ‘letter boxes’ in piles of laundry, spaces under the carpets or the back pockets of servants’ breeches remained unwavering throughout. Plainly, the letters from his wife, if written, were not arriving as before, but, more curiously still, his own surviving comments suggest by and large that he was not unduly moved by this. Certainly, there was no impassioned effort on his part to overcome the breach himself or establish its cause. A reciprocal cooling, it must be assumed, had somehow occurred and the royal couple were accepting the fact with only occasional and somewhat pallid nods at their former ardour.

In Charles’ case, however, the loss of such an important emotional prop had by no means extinguished his interest in at least one other member of her sex, since Jane Whorwood, who had already distinguished herself by tireless service to his cause, now assumed other duties which gave her altogether broader significance in the king’s estimation. The daughter of William Ryder of Kingston-upon-Thames – a German-born Scot who had become a surveyor of James I’s stables, and, after his death, stepdaughter of James Maxwell, Groom of the Bedchamber – she had married Brome Whorwood of Holton, Oxfordshire, in 1634 at the age of 19, and became well known during the Civil War in the Royalist capital at Oxford. Even before this time, in fact, her stepfather had brought her to court and acquainted her with the king. But it was her role as an underground messenger and, indeed, smuggler that had made her so invaluable initially. It was she, after all, who had smuggled gold bullion into Oxford hidden in barrels of soap, and she likewise who, at scarcely less personal risk, had consorted with William Lilly on her sovereign’s behalf. Not only loyal and intrepid but ingenious too, she had been sent, as we have seen, to Hampton Court in late 1647 with half of the £1,000 in gold raised by Thomas Adams, leader of the City of London’s Royalists. Before then, Charles himself had shown no hesitation in entrusting to her care a casket of jewels at the time of his flight from Oxford, and rewarding her subsequently with no little influence for her trouble. Indeed, from a letter written by Sir Edward Nicholas Oudart on 18 February 1647, it would appear that her alleged lover, Sir Thomas Bendish, owed more to her efforts in obtaining his appointment as Ambassador of Constantinople than to the £3,000 he paid to William Murray for the same purpose.

‘Had the rest done their parts as carefully as Whorwood,’ wrote one of Charles’ inner circle to the Earl of Lanark on 27 June 1648, ‘the king had been at large.’ But by this time, she was already on her way to becoming far more for her sovereign than a gifted secret agent. For in July, Jane was on the Isle of Wight, probably staying with the family of William Hopkins, with whom she soon became close friends, and on 26 July Charles wrote to ‘Sweet Jane Whorwood’ suggesting that she might circumvent the Derby House Committee rule that only those with their permission could visit him, by having Captain Mildmay invite her to his room. The captain, who slept across the king’s chamber door each night to bar his escape, was in fact impervious to his prisoner’s charms, and had even described him to his courtier brother, Henry, as ‘the most perfidious man that ever lived’. But the intention was for Charles to gain access to Jane by entering Mildmay’s room, as if by accident, when she was there. Plainly, the urge to see her was a compelling one, and it was hardly insignificant, too, that he signed this particular letter ‘your most loving Charles’.

Among contemporaries, in fact, the term ‘sweet’ bore none of its modern-day connotations. No more, indeed, than the current use of ‘dear’ in letters was it intended to betoken any emotional significance. Clarendon and Berkeley, for example, used it to each other as friends, as did royal princes; and ‘Sweet Saviour’ was a commonplace in prayer. Before long, however, Charles was also describing himself as Jane’s ‘best Platonick Lover or Servant’, and he would eventually send her at least sixteen messages over the next few months, meeting her in secret several more times in the process. In due course, he chaffed when she and Mrs Hopkins were unable to come and see him, and then yearned inordinately for their visits. Likewise, when Jane did not respond to his messages he became testy, and when she suffered some ‘barbarity’ at the hands of ‘a pretended … gentleman’, he sent her a ‘consoliatory letter’, following it next day with another in the hope that it would bring ‘her Contentment … for her’s to me gave so much’.

At the start of August, meanwhile, he would beg her not to leave the island, and on 13 August delivered the following cryptic message to Hopkins:

Tell N [Jane] when you give this enclosed to her that it is now the best caudle [medicinal broth] I can send her, but if she would have a better she must come to fetch it herself … her Platonick Way doth much spoil the taste in my mind and if she would leave me to my free Cookery, I should think to make her confess so herself.

The double entendre was manifest, and the reference to Jane’s ‘Platonick Way’ smacked plainly of the kind of masqued courtly romancing that was commonplace for the day. ‘Caudle’, on the other hand, between two Scots, was a homely version of the French ‘medecin’, which the king and his queen appear to have used earlier in reference to their sexual love. Though Jane never became the ‘Sweet Heart’ or ‘Dear Heart’ that Charles used in his letters to Henrietta Maria, and the ‘eternally thine’ that he employed with his wife plainly eclipsed the ‘you’ with which he addressed Jane, the evidence for a romantic link seems hard to deny. Jane too, for that matter, had written of her own need to ‘satisfy desires’, and by this time her marriage to the violently inclined and unfaithful Brome Whorwood had, it seems, already broken down irretrievably, making it wholly understandable that she should feel free to reciprocate the king’s interest. Addressing him as ‘my dear friend’ and signing herself with the nom de plume ‘Your Most affectionate Hellen’, she had plainly established a special bond with her sovereign, amply demonstrated by the fact that, though she remained discretion personified, she was confident enough to ask William Hopkins on 13 November to ‘present my affectionate love … to my dear friend 391’.

Charles’ devotion to, and indeed dependence upon, his wife was, of course, widely acknowledged at the time. For many observers, it conformed admirably with the picture of the grave, dignified family man who had imposed his own brand of moral uprightness upon the profane and dissolute courtly world of his father. ‘The face of the court was much changed in the change of the king,’ wrote Lucy Hutchinson, ‘for King Charles was temperate and chaste and serious, so that the fools and bawds, mimics and catamites of the former court grew out of fashion.’ If such a hostile critic to the king on political and religious grounds could write so approvingly of his beneficial influence in at least this one area, it is not hard to appreciate how entrenched this perception had become. Though he openly acknowledged the king’s indecisiveness, lack of enterprise and meanness, Clarendon, too, had no hesitation in perpetuating the notion that ‘he could never endure any light or profane word with what sharpness of wit soever it was covered’. ‘And though he was well pleased and delighted with reading verses upon any occasion,’ he continued, ‘no man durst bring him any thing that was profane or unclean.’

Where Charles’ dealings with his wife were concerned, moreover, even his enemies appear to have accepted his reputation for ‘goodness’, though they seasoned it, too, with accusations of ‘uxoriousness’ that they levelled against him at every opportunity. As runt of the royal litter, Charles was, it seems, always vulnerable to accusations of undue dependence on women, dating back to a childhood in which governesses and nurses coddled the ‘spindly small and stuttering’ junior prince in Scotland in an effort to make up for a long-absent mother gone south to be queen in 1603. The French wife, whom the Royalist newsletter Mercurius Britannicus eulogised as ‘our sovereign she-saint’, was considered by less sympathetic observers to be nothing less than a ruthless, self-interested and unashamed exploiter of this particular weakness – someone whose unnatural primacy in the royal household scorned the patriarchal order.

Before his execution in 1649, Charles would ask his daughter to tell the queen that his thoughts had not strayed from her since their parting at Abingdon in 1644 as she left Oxford. There seems little reason to doubt that Henrietta Maria remained what might be termed her husband’s ‘fundamental option’. It was her miniature, after all, that he carried with him throughout his misfortunes, concealed in the Garter George he bore upon his breast. But there was, it seems, another side to this most private of men, who frowned upon duelling and gambling and had refused a court post to the Duke of Buckingham’s brother, Kit, on the grounds that ‘he would have no drunkards of his chamber’. Clarendon’s claim, for example, that he disliked ‘unclean’ language can be countered by a number of instances where, as a young man, he had engaged quite lightly in vulgarity and sexual innuendo. In 1624, during the French marriage negotiations, Viscount Kensington had received a furious letter from Charles addressing him as ‘Captaine Cokescombe’, and declaring that he ‘would not caire a fart for [the] frendshippe’ of the ‘Moñsers’ were it not for his respect for ‘Madam’ (Henrietta Maria). One year later, moreover, in a letter to the Duke of Buckingham, we find him employing his father’s apparently affectionate, but obscene, term for the duke’s wife, mother and sister. For James I these august ladies had been duly dubbed ‘counts’, i.e. ‘cunts’, and for his son the same term still applied, while just prior to his marriage, William Montague reported to the Earl of Carlisle in Paris how Charles was swearing how his wife-to-be ‘shall haue no more powder till he powder her and blow her up himselfe’.

In their own right, of course, such fragments hardly shatter the traditional image of the king propagated so sedulously by his sympathisers and enshrined in Eikon Basilike. But there was talk, too, of sexual licence – and not always from wholly tainted sources. William Lilly, for instance, who was acquainted with Jane Whorwood, remarked in his Observations on the Life and Death of King Charles I, published in 1651, how Charles ‘rarely frequented illicit beds’ and ‘prostituted his affections only to those of exquisite persons or parts’. ‘As the queen well knew’, Lilly went on, ‘he rarely forgot’ his marriage, and ‘when he did wander it was with much caution or secrecy’. Sir Edward Peyton, in his turn, accused the king of courting ‘a very great lady’ at Oxford in 1643 during the queen’s absence, after sending the lady’s husband abroad – a charge which coincides curiously in some details with Jane Whorwood’s whereabouts at the time and Brome Whorwood’s trip to Holland and the Continent in that year. By this time, in fact, Brome had already embarked upon an affair with Katherine Mary Allen, a household servant, and made his journey in an effort, it seems, to avoid involvement in the war rather than at the king’s direct behest. Indeed, Jane would much later testify to Chancery that her husband had absented herself from her ‘beyond the seas’ both ‘wilfully and without cause’. But if she was not the object of the king’s desire by then, someone else may well have been, and even so notable a commentator as John Milton would later come to relish the ‘whispers in court of the king’s bad actions … polluted with Arcadias and romances’.

Certainly, there were grounds for a liaison of some kind on both Jane’s and Charles’ parts: she as a zealous devotee of the Crown, frustrated and slighted in her marriage, he as a lonely, increasingly careworn man, separated from a wife who, though still loved after a fashion, had nevertheless done more than enough over the years to weaken his fidelity. Though no known portrait of her exists, Jane Whorwood appears to have been a handsome enough woman in her own right, notwithstanding the ‘pock holes in her face’, which were mentioned by the Derby House Committee when they issued an otherwise favourable description of her in 1648. In the words of her pursuers, 38-year-old Jane was ‘a tall, well-fashioned and well-languaged gentlewoman, with a round visage’, and she was remembered equally for her flame-red hair, which, though an impediment in contemporary eyes, had nevertheless been one more feature allowing her to turn heads upon her arrival in a small city like Civil War Oxford.

Around that time, John Cleveland of the Oxford garrison wrote a tribute to ideal beauty, enitled To Prince Rupert, which contained references to a number of figures, all of whom were real, making the following lines, not altogether implausibly perhaps, particularly significant:

Such was the painter’s brief for Venus’ face,

Item, an eye from Jane, a lip from Grace.

But it was still, in any case, a woman’s actions rather than her complexion that stood out as her real measure. Diana Maxwell, Jane’s half-sister, who sat for Lely, the court painter, and was celebrated for her good looks, was remembered ultimately only for her greed, while Jane herself, victim of a violent husband and mother of four children, three of whom had died, was prepared to risk all in service to her principles, operating only ‘through a lattice and enveloped in a mist’, as the clergyman John Barwick, her fellow Royalist spy, put it. Nor would she be rewarded in the longer term for her efforts. ‘My travels, the variety of accidents (and especially dangers) more become a Romance than a letter,’ she wrote in 1648. Yet it was others, like Silius Titus, who eventually reaped the reward for their sacrifices on the king’s behalf. ‘I have ten times ventured my life in His Majesty’s service when his affairs were desperate,’ Titus later boasted, as promotion, financial rewards and a place in Parliament came his way. While Whorwood’s namesake Jane Lane, who assisted the escape of Charles II after his defeat at Worcester in 1651, was lavished with a pension from the king and a valuable jewel from Parliament, for Charles I’s would-be saviour there was only obscurity and the ongoing mistreatment of her husband to look forward to.

In 1657, indeed, two years before she finally achieved a formal separation, Jane Whorwood would be forced to leave home in fear of her life and under constant threats and taunts from the man who was demanding by then that she allow his mistress to reside within her house. Four years younger than his wife, Brome derided her as a ‘jade’, i.e a worn-out nag, and ‘whore’, and banned the local vicar, Albert Eales, from seeing her after taking a ‘great distaste’ to her refusal ‘to let Katherine Allen live with in the house’. On one occasion, indeed, when Brome caught his wife going through their park to visit Eales’ wife in labour, he ‘took her against a tree’, it seems, and ‘hit and kneed her and banged her head’. Telling her at other times that ‘she was old and her breath stinketh’, he frequently ‘did beat, kick and drag her and strike her’, we hear, ‘and did sometime batter and bruise and wound her, and did curse and threaten to kill her’. Servants at Holton would also testify before Chancery in 1659 how Brome and Allen had conceived ‘a base child’, and that he had told his wife how he ‘would rather kiss Katherine Allen’s arse than touch thee’.

Such behaviour was of long-standing and it was this, of course, that had made an extra-marital liaison – especially one conceived as a patriotic duty – so easy an option for Jane more than a decade earlier. But there is also much more than circumstantial evidence available to corroborate an intimate relationship between the king and his agent, and it is to be found in the two surviving letters that he wrote to her. Both, quite curiously, employ cipher almost throughout, indicating perhaps a more perilous intended route for them, but also indicating, alternatively, that Charles was particularly anxious to conceal their content from all but the intended reader. Certainly, the cipher itself is a relatively complex one, and though it was largely broken in the twentieth century, the deciphering process remained highly dependent upon context and conjecture based upon the likely initial letters of the words concerned. In essence, it involved the employment of single or double-digit numbers for individual letters, apparently assigned at random, and the application of at least two different numbers to every letter, so that the 24 letters of the early modern alphabet (i/j and u/v each being treated as one), together with various ‘nulls’, i.e. dummies designed to sow confusion, or blanks to serve as word spacings, are represented by numbers from 1 to 70. Similarly, two- or three-digit numbers are used to indicate specific whole words, syllables or proper names, rendering Charles, for example, ‘391’ and Jane ‘390’.

On this basis, the first of Charles’ two letters to Jane, dated Monday, 24 July, was until recently interpreted thus:

Sweet 390, your two letters … so to doe: Yet I imagen that there is one way possible that you may get answering from me (you must excuse my plaine expressions) which is to get acquaintance with the new woman (who you may trust for she now convaise all my letters) and by her meanes you may be convayed into the stoole room (which is within my bedchamber) while I am at dinner by which means I shall have 3 howers to embrace and nippe you (for every day after dinner I shut myself upp alone for so long) and while I go a walking she can relive you when however though this should prove impossible (as I hold it will not) yet I am sure this new woman can convay to me what letters you would giue her wherefore you must be acquainted with her.

The ‘new woman’ was, in fact, an illiterate serving woman who emptied Charles’ toilet and had been enlisted by Hopkins to smuggle correspondence. Now, it seems, she was to be called upon to assist in servicing the king’s broader physical needs. Quite how ‘Sweet 390’ was to be allowed entry to Carisbrooke in the first place remains puzzling, of course, given the Derby House Committee’s suspicion of her activities, but once inside, her destination was clear: the royal ‘stoole room’, or lavatory, where she could be ‘nipped’ and ‘embraced’ at leisure over a three-hour period.

Likewise, the second of Charles’ letters, written on 26 July, in which he proposes that he should intercept her, as if by accident, with a sudden entry into Captain Mildmay’s apartments, also mentions his intention ‘to get you alone in to my chamber’, which was next door, and thereafter to ‘smother Jane’ with ‘407’. Whether ‘407’ meant ‘embraces’, as has been suggested in some interpretations, remains uncertain. But that Charles desired to meet Jane alone in his room and smother her in something is no more in doubt than the way he chose to end the message: ‘your most loving 391’. If the conclusion that a sexual liaison was involved is not actually inescapable, it seems more than merely plausible, and accords perfectly with the import of his message two days earlier, which appears itself to contain further material to confirm that not only was Charles intent upon a relationship with Jane that was far from ‘Platonick’, but prepared to express his urges with a coarseness that belies his prudish reputation.

The king’s apparent decision to consort with Jane in his ‘stoole room’ adds in itself, of course, a less than romantic patina to his behaviour. But the most recent reinterpretation of his message of 24 July adds a whole new dimension, arguably, to the earthiness of his approach to courtship. Certainly, the passage ‘you may get answering from me (you must excuse my plaine expressions)’ is puzzling both in grammatical clumsiness, and in its reference to ‘answering’ as a ‘plaine expression’. In fact, for ‘answering’ to be correct, Charles, we now know, would have had to make three separate errors in the cipher, which runs: ‘26:23:66:50:12:3:222’. Of these seven elements, 26 is twice used on other occasions by Jane Whorwood for ‘a’, while 66 is employed for ‘s’, and 3 for ‘u/v’ (as opposed to ‘r’, which would be required in ‘answering’). In its turn, 222 can be deduced to be ‘-ing’, as it is used as a suffix to both ‘wallk’ [sic] in the message of 24 July, and ‘do’ in Charles’ letter two days later. Perhaps more significantly, however, it now seems that 23 was used by both Jane and Charles as a separating device between words and sentences. If so, the word interpreted until recently as ‘answering’ – consisting, as it does, of the four elements ‘a23:s50:12:uing’ – must mean something else.

All hinges, then, upon the meaning of the numbers 50 and 12, both of which are employed not infrequently in the king’s other correspondence. The former, in fact, can be confidently identified as ‘w’, and although 12 is more problematic, it was certainly used by Charles for the letter ‘y’ in both ‘Mildmay’ and ‘conuay’. The result is a noteworthy reinterpretation of the opening sentence of the first of his surviving letters to Jane, which removes all ambiguity and rids us, too, of the other infelicities entailed by inserting the word ‘answering’. For now the sentence reads: ‘Yet I imagen that there is one way possible that you may get a swyuing from me (you must excuse my plaine expressions)’. And since ‘swiving’ has but one meaning in a seventeenth-century context, the term ‘plaine expression’ could not be more appropriate when used in association with it. Employed several times in Fletcher’s translation of Martial’s Epigrams, and more frequently still in the pornographic verses of John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, it is the contemporary equivalent to the term ‘fuck’.

Whether Charles succeeded in his intentions with Jane remains uncertain. His later references to ‘her Platonick Way’ might well suggest otherwise, of course, and there is no guarantee in any case that his plans to gain access to her were actually fulfilled. She was, after all, a well-known prime suspect for the Derby House Committee at a time when security around the king had already tightened considerably. Nor, likewise, does one prurient expression, or, arguably, even an extra-marital lapse serve entirely to negate our perceptions of Charles as an otherwise sober-minded and generally moral man. His apparent wish to ‘swyve’ his most loyal helper – in the royal ‘stoole room’ no less – stands in undeniable contrast to the saintly stereotypes associated with Eikon Basilike and heaped upon him by his supporters. Indeed, it might even suggest that beneath the regal posturing and platitudes, there was an all-too-human streak in his make-up, encompassing selfishness and exploitation, which was rather more in keeping with the suspicions of his enemies than the adulation of his admirers.

But the king’s gentler, more winning side continued to shine through, and never more so, indeed, than around this time. For, although he was now showing his years, Charles had grown personally during his time in captivity, developing a capacity to give of himself, make friends and win the loyalty of individuals high and low. Over this trying period, indeed, he came to find much pleasure in the company of ordinary people, appreciating more keenly, perhaps, both his own humanity and the sacrifices they were prepared to endure on his behalf. Like his son Charles II, after the Battle of Worcester, or his great grandson Bonnie Prince Charlie after Culloden Moor, he came in adversity, it seems, to relate to his subjects more directly, not only tolerating a subtle relaxation of protocol but even encouraging a greater degree of informality in his relations. The dangers of his situation in the Scots army camp at Newcastle had induced the aristocrats Jack Ashburnham, Henry Jermyn and John Culpepper, writing from Paris, to address him with a freedom and urgency that at first took him aback. But not long afterwards, he was writing to humbler figures like Firebrace, Titus and Hopkins in what he termed his ‘slow hand’ – a neat secretary script rather than his normal italic – with remarkable ease, openness and consideration. ‘All I have to say,’ he informed Titus on Sunday, 14 May, ‘is that I see you well satisfied with me, so I am you.’ To emphasise the closeness of their bond, he did not hesitate to sign himself ‘your most asseured constant friend’.

Even servants and the wives of those who served him gradually became objects of concern, meriting personal gratitude and encouragement. When Mrs Dowcett, like her husband Abraham, was struggling with her anxieties, she too was consoled and told to be ‘confident of me’ and ‘doubt not of my Carefullnes’. ‘I shall observe your dayes, & not trouble you oftener, except upon very urgent occasion,’ Charles continued, before mentioning his hope that the ‘time will come that you shall thanke me for more than looking well upon you’. Likewise, as Mrs Wheeler, the king’s laundress, went about her business, smuggling correspondence to the king, he did not hesitate to extend his personal thanks. ‘I know,’ he told her, ‘that nothing will come amiss when it comes in thy hand.’ The spouse of William Hopkins was also treated with a solicitude that Charles had rarely extended to the wives of his great officers of state, when he humoured her son who had taken offence at some unintended slight and reacted with the kind of surliness painfully characteristic of adolescents. ‘As for yourself, be sure,’ the king promised the whole Hopkins family, ‘when I keep house again there will be those, who shall think themselves happy & yet sit lower at the table than you.’

Hopkins himself, indeed, would come to be treated as a trusted confidant and counsellor, notwithstanding his comparatively humble rank as headmaster of Newport Grammar School. A friend of Sir John Oglander, his royalism went back in fact to August 1642, when a Parliamentary mob had sacked his house for signing a Royalist manifesto, after which he had evidently been largely excluded from the civic life of the town, since his name appears only incidentally in the Corporation records. But he too would enjoy a special status in the king’s affection, initially getting letters to the king by means of the illiterate serving woman he had procured to empty the king’s stool pan, and it was from this modest beginning that Hopkins became another to achieve unimagined intimacy with his sovereign, receiving sixty-two letters between 2 July and 8 December 1648. ‘I desire you,’ Charles told him on 16 July, ‘to make your Queries, or Objections, freely to me’, adding in another message only the next day how ‘I shall be in pain until you resolve me, because I shall be sorry to be the Occasion of the least inconvenience to you’.

It was manifestly a changing, if not changed, king: one who could enjoy a freedom of intercourse that had never been allowed in his former, more guarded days at court in London, and one, perhaps, more open than ever to the most intimate relations of all. For, though his fortunes had fallen, he was still king and retained the aphrodisiac of power. Never once, it is true, did Charles mention Jane to Henrietta Maria, even assuring her on one occasion that if his wife found out about their relationship, she would surely approve. But he was now 48 and had not seen the queen for four years, during which time the two had grown increasingly quarrelsome over a range of fundamental issues, as communications between them deteriorated. He was lonely and dispirited, confiding to Sir Philip Warwick that his best day-to-day companion at this time was the ‘little old crumpling man’ who made his fires. He longed, it seems, for the consolations of a woman’s voice and a woman’s sympathy at a time when he was faced imminently not only with the daunting prospect of another escape attempt but the consequences of both starting and losing a second civil war.

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