12

‘Neither Peace Nor Honour’

‘And their fault who have appeared in this summer’s business is certainly double to theirs who were in the first, because it is the repetition of the same offence against all the witnesses God has borne.’

Oliver Cromwell, November, 1648

On the evening of Sunday, 21 May, a travel-stained and agitated rider had entered Carisbrooke on a lathering post-horse to demand an interview with the Governor that could not be delayed. Introducing himself as Job Weals, a physician from Kingston-upon-Thames, he declared that he carried an urgent message from army headquarters. But his unexpected entrance was accompanied by a fainting fit, which left him blaming the rigours of his journey and insisting upon a drink of hot water before he could get down to business. It was not the way army couriers handled urgent matters, and it was not enough to convince Robert Hammond that all was in order – particularly at a time when another civil war, arranged through the secret agreement forged with the Scots at Christmas, was daily gathering pace. Though a correspondent had warned the Earl of Lanark on 11 April that the king was ‘as impatient of your long delayes as you are sorry for the occasion’, in Wales and England, Royalist troops had nevertheless begun to muster, while at Pembroke, Colonel Poyer boldly declared for the crown, sparking further risings in Essex, Kent and Surrey the following month. Even, indeed, in London itself, Parliament had now become increasingly vulnerable to the whim of the mob, as army columns marched forth to restore order in the country at large.

While Hammond listened to his visitor’s claims, therefore, he did so warily, awaiting confirmation of his suspicions. For Weals now told of an extraordinary plot both to seize the king and kill the Governor by 4 a.m. next morning. A fleet, he claimed, was off the island, and moving into the Solent that evening, ready to land troops during the night. On the excuse of attending a fair to be held at Newport the following day, a mass of people were also to arrive from the mainland to assist the enterprise, aided by signal beacons to raise the islanders and wreak general confusion. As such, declared Weals, there was but one course to follow. Hammond must hand over the king to him and allow the royal prisoner to be conducted to Major Lobb, commanding Portsmouth. Only thus could Charles be secured and disaster averted.

Yet for tales of this kind to convince, even remotely, they would have to be backed by the kind of written authorisation that Weals could not produce when asked. Instead, his response to Hammond’s request for his papers verged on the farcical. They were, he said, quilted up in his waistcoat and for Lobb’s eyes only. When the Governor persisted, the game was soon up. For the imposter was carefully searched and found to be carrying various petitions from Surrey, along with a message about navy victualling which, with great effrontery, he had intercepted from the Portsmouth to London post on his way down. Were it not for the tension in the country at large, Weals’ foolishness might well have served as nothing more than a recipe for merry tales in the castle’s guardroom, but in May 1648 there was little scope for laughter either there or elsewhere. On the contrary, there was seething anger that the stubborn man confined at Carisbrooke – the ‘man of blood’ so detested by so many – had once more brought his subjects to a reckoning of arms.

Yet the causes of the new conflict were by no means all of the king’s own making. That so many of the revolts of 1648 occurred in formerly Parliamentarian counties amply reflected, on the one hand, the growing realisation of property-owners that what many had once taken to be a godly cause was no longer worth the sacrifices it entailed. For most, moreover, the absence of reform or indeed a settlement of any kind in the many months since the conclusion of hostilities merely compounded the broken promises of 1642. From his parish of Earls Colne in Essex, the clergyman Ralph Josselin noted in early 1648 that this was ‘a sad dear time for poor people’ with ‘money almost out of the country’, while other observers like John Milton, who had formerly defended the Parliamentary cause with such enthusiasm, were by now yearning to see ‘Public Faith cleard from the shamefull brand of Public Fraud’. For in the country at large, there was equally widespread dissatisfaction with the imposition of Presbyterianism from Westminster, as only eight of England’s forty counties made any significant effort to support the new order. When Sir John Holland boldly declared that he would as readily ‘live under the tyranny of the Turk as the tyranny of the clergy’, he had merely echoed a common note ringing out well beyond the narrow circle of the gentry.

As such, it was hardly surprising, perhaps, that the widespread demonstrations in London that culminated in rioting on 26 March should have coincided with the anniversary of the royal accession. Though there is no evidence from his surviving letters that the king himself was anything more than a bystander amid the current upheavals, it was no surprise either that the tension at Carisbrooke continued to heighten daily. For Hammond’s attempts to improve the castle’s fortification had not run smoothly, and the twelve guns ordered from Poole on 7 February took nearly three months to arrive, since the town’s governor had pleaded that the guns were too old, and produced a certificate from his gunner to confirm as much. No less frustratingly, Hammond had been forced to point out on 22 April that only half of the £1,000 promised by Parliament had actually been paid. There was, he complained, an urgent need for ‘an able ingeneere, who may provide what further security, wth reasonable charge, may be given to this so considerable place’, and there could be no delay either in providing the castle with a granary and adequate store of corn.

Above all, however, there was a pressing requirement for extra men, over and beyond the 300 that had been available since March. For the castle to be manned effectively, at least two more companies were essential, and though Hammond’s existing troops were proving difficult to pay, a further appeal went out to the Derby House Committee on 22 May, in the wake of Job Weals’ visit, by which time the naval guard on the Isle of Wight was down to only one ship, as a result of the mutiny in the fleet on the Downs. Worse still, the Prince of Wales was now at sea with a Royalist fleet from Holland and intent upon an attack, to be co-ordinated with a rising of the king’s supporters on the island itself. The heir to the throne was to be joined, it seems, by the ‘revolted shipps’ from the Parliamentary fleet, which, according to a letter from the Derby House Committee on 30 June, ‘hold intelligence with some in the isle’ and ‘doubt not to effect their design’. Among those involved, according to evidence taken in April 1651, was none other than ‘younge Oglander, Sir John’s son’, along with ‘most of the gentlemen in the Isle of Wight’.

Under such circumstances, Hammond’s requests could hardly be delayed further, so that by 15 June, two companies of Colonel Ewer’s regiment, stationed at Gloucester, were duly ordered to the Isle of Wight, where their landing was expected to occur some ten days later. On the same day, it was ordered, too, that Hammond be supplied with additional munitions taken out of Sussex, which were to include ‘an Hundred of Hand Granado Shells’ and 200 demi-culverin from Arundel Castle, though even this, it seems, would not entirely quieten the Governor’s anxieties. ‘Horse would be of excellent use here’, he suggested on 23 June, and two days later he was pressing his case to the Derby House Committee once more. ‘I doe believe,’ he wrote, ‘if I had saddles & armes, & there were any way for their certain pay, I could raise a good troope of horse out of the well affected of the island.’

Plainly, the situation remained delicately poised. For in May an army mutiny in South Wales, which Royalists skilfully exploited, had sparked a chain reaction, and although resistance was largely crushed by Thomas Horton at St Fagan’s near Cardiff before Cromwell finally arrived, the survivors’ spirited defence of Pembroke Castle delayed him for two months, leaving Fairfax to deal on his own with further trouble in the south-east. Nearer to Carisbrooke, moreover, events were continuing to assume an ominous hue. ‘The saylors in the ships here,’ reported a local newsletter on 20 July, ‘as also the people in the Island, doe not cry for King and Parl. but for King and the ships.’ The Governor of Portsmouth had not hesitated in response to bar the suspect vessels from harbour, as Hammond did his best to raise his local cavalry troop, among whom, it seems, were various parish ministers like a certain Mr Evans, whom one newsletter saw fit to single out as a volunteer of particularly ‘active spirit’.

With the Governor fearing the worst, it was only to be expected, of course, that efforts should have increased to curtail his prisoner’s contact with the world outside. ‘Here is ane imposibilty of sending to the king’, a Scottish agent complained on 24 June, as Royalist pamphlets recounted sorry tales of his being ‘bolted and rebolted in an out room in Carisbrooke Castle where he hath blowd his owne fire and turn’d up his own bed’. By now, if Clarendon is to be believed, the prisoner’s hair was ‘all gray, which, making all others very sad, made it thought that he had sorrow in his countenance’, and there was no end either to the abundant rumours of foul play, which circulated constantly in Royalist circles. A letter to the Earl of Lanark, for instance, dated 20 June, suggested that the king had prevailed upon Hammond to take some exercise, only to find his upper-storey apartment collapse inexplicably as he made his way to the nearby bowling green.

Nor, on the other hand, had Charles abandoned all talk of escape, as the illiterate serving woman, whose toilet duties took her daily into the royal bedchamber, continued to carry secret correspondence to and from Newport, where the ubiquitous Major Bosvile was now waiting to organise its distribution. By this means, indeed, the prisoner seems to have been able to re-establish contact with the queen herself, for on 1 July he thanked Titus for helping to bring this about. ‘I know not,’ he declared, ‘whether my astonishment or my joy were the greater; for indeed I did dispaire of hearing any more from you, or any other of my frends, during these damnable tymes.’ It was around now, too, that the king first struck up his correspondence with Sir William Hopkins, the Master of Newport Grammar School who had originally engineered the appointment of the king’s intrepid toilet maid. Certainly, Charles’ delight was palpable upon finding that a new and reliable means of communication had been established through Hopkins’ ingenuity, as he made clear to Firebrace on 29 June, emphasising how this new ‘way of conueyance’ was ‘safe, unsuspected, & not tyed to dayes’.

Even more important for the king’s flagging morale, however, were Hopkins’ efforts to secure his liberation, for on 10 July the schoolmaster had already sent word of a plan through the agency of a lady designated by the number 47, who is likely to have been his own wife. She had succeeded, we are told, in obtaining a private interview at Carisbrooke, and the paper from her husband that she brought with her outlined proposals to raise the island’s Royalists, surprise the garrison, arrest Hammond and convey the king away by means of a boat. Though the scheme was neither novel in conception nor any more plausible in essence than previous proposals of the kind, it did at least involve Henry Ley, 3rd Earl of Marlborough, who had been General of the Ordnance and Admiral in Command at Dartmouth, which was enough, it seems, to stir Charles’ hopes anew, as he made clear in a letter dated 14 July. ‘I do well approve of Marlborough to be a chief Conductor, as for matter of Action,’ he wrote, ‘for I am confident of his Courage and Honesty; so, if the business is well laid, he may do as well as any other.’

To his credit, Hopkins had also taken pains to arrange a system of couriers to London, whereby the king was able to communicate with Firebrace, whom he now proceeded to disguise under the name of David Griffin. Learning, perhaps, from past mistakes, Charles was equally careful to avoid any mention of Hopkins himself, observing only that his dispatches had been conveyed by an ‘unknown way’, while another correspondent, designated ‘52’ and most probably Nicholas Oudart, was also contacted abroad. Most significant of all among the new stream of correspondence, however, were ciphered letters involving Jane Whorwood, or ‘Hellen’ as she now became known. For even at this point, as is clear from his letters on 24 and 26 July, Charles was keen to devise plans for her to achieve a private interview with him in his bedchamber, which, by some extraordinary artifice or other, she actually seems to have achieved little more than a month later, at which time Hopkins was asked to ‘thank her for the visit she stole upon me yesternight’. ‘For seriously,’ the king added, ‘I could hardly believe my own eyes when I saw her.’

The same puzzling lapses in internal security, which had dogged Hammond since his appointment as the king’s captor, were still, then, glaringly evident, and without the Governor’s tireless personal vigilance, it seems likely that Charles might well have stirred up far more trouble than he actually managed, both in the wider world outside and within the castle itself. Plainly, the king’s guards were at best half-hearted in their efforts, if not outright sympathisers with his cause, and the same deference to his regal status, not to mention the abiding hope that he might yet agree to reasonable terms, was even now intact. For Charles, therefore, Hammond alone remained the unshakeable stumbling-block to his plans, and in a letter to Hopkins on 16 July, in which he designated himself ‘39’ and the Governor ‘50’, he plainly implied as much by pointing out ‘that unless you secure 50. the Seizing of all the rest of the Horse will not (in my Opinion) do the Work; because he will sooner get help to recover his Loss , than you will be able to force 39. out of his hands’.

One week later, the same preoccupation with the Governor was again in evidence when Hopkins was asked to consider some means of apprehending him:

As to the maine Business; I will only aske you; do you not meane; (when your preparations are made) as well, to seek an Oportunety, by laying a traine for 50:, as to lay houlde of one when he gives it to you?

Within the fortnight, Charles’ respect for his captor’s tenacity, coupled to his ongoing fears for securing the island, had actually put paid altogether to his intended escape. For in a letter to Hopkins of 26 July, his misgivings were already ‘of such waight’ that he found himself unable to give a ‘determinat resolution concerning it’, and by the next day, as he made clear to Hopkins in another letter, these same misgivings had finally consumed his hopes entirely concerning ‘the greater designe’.

As Charles grudgingly accepted his impotence, all was left to depend, in fact, upon the success of Royalist efforts on the mainland, bolstered by no more than a ‘letter of credit’ entrusted to his 15-year-old son. The Scots, it is true, were finally to cross the border on 8 July, and three weeks later Parliament once more approved the idea of a treaty with the king. But Scottish troops were little match for Cromwell’s, and it was equally clear that any subsequent agreement with Westminster would be wholly on Parliament’s terms, since the news for Charles on all other fronts was nothing less than calamitous. While Colchester held out for the Royalist cause, there was still a straw of sorts to clutch at. But, as the king made clear to Titus on 1 July, this final lifeline would not be long-lived. ‘We heere do beliue all the Gallant honnest Men in Colchester infallibly lost, though yet they hould out,’ he told Titus despairingly. Nine days later, he was informing Firebrace of further ‘ill Newes come hither concerning the Earl of Holand’, who had been captured in Hertfordshire following an abortive rising at Kingston in Surrey.

So when three parliamentary commissioners – the Earl of Essex, Sir John Hippesley and John Bulkeley, MP for Yarmouth – arrived at Carisbrooke late on 5 August after a crossing delayed by stormy weather, the king’s only effective bargaining counter was the fragile allegiance of the Scots. As a gesture of goodwill, the commissioners had brought with them not only Titus but Babington, the royal barber, and a proposal that while negotiations were in progress, Charles might reside at Newport, experiencing the kind of liberty he had previously enjoyed at Hampton Court. Yet that same night, the prisoner wrote once more to Hopkins to speak of ‘a New Conceipt of myne, concerning our great Business’, which would prove to be nothing more than a further feeble escape effort, delayed until Parliament’s peace proposals had been delivered officially. ‘As soon as I heare what the 3 London-Commissioners say to me,’ he told Hopkins the day after their arrival, ‘I will perform the Promise I made to you Yesternight; in the mean tyme you shall do well to keepe all affections straight.’

Nevertheless, at their first formal meeting on Monday, 7 August, the commissioners seemed heartened by the demeanour of the king, ‘from whome’, it was reported to Westminster by one of those present, ‘(if conjecturs grounded on my one observations, & the sence of such as frequently Convers with him, faile me not) you are likely to receive a Complying Answer’. On Thursday, 10 August, moreover, such optimism appeared well-founded, for, in a crowded Presence Chamber, the king formally congratulated his visitors upon presenting ‘a fair beginning to a happy peace’. When Parliament first voted to negotiate on 29 July, Charles had been pessimistic. ‘I have not great hope that much good will come of it,’ he reflected, ‘because I do not believe that those who come to Treat will have Power to debate, but only to propose.’ Besides which, he added, ‘what capacity a Prisoner hath to Treate as yett I know not’. Yet debate had ultimately proved unnecessary, since the commissioners had offered an amenable basis for the initiation of meaningful talks, and the king reacted accordingly. He concluded:

There might be some that would oppose this Treaty being Gainers by the War, and therefore desired the Continuance of it … Others may think Me revengeful, but, for My Part, I am so far from seeking any, that if a Straw would hurt them, I would not stoop to take it up. God forgive them; for I do.

The ‘Treaty’ of which Charles spoke was not, in fact, a settlement in its own right, but merely, in accordance with the contemporary meaning of the term, an agreement to negotiate. No actual resolution of the conflict was ever, indeed, likely to ensue, since Parliament’s position remained essentially the same as the one it had adopted at Hampton Court in 1647 and subsequently at Carisbrooke shortly after Charles’ arrival. Nor was Parliament’s superficial generosity prompted by any substantive threat from Scotland. Rather, it was fear of the army and ongoing distaste for the more radical religious elements within it that brought Presbyterian MPs to the negotiating table, while for Charles the talks offered little more than a welcome respite from the wretchedness of incarceration at Carisbrooke, and further opportunity to indulge his fantasies of freedom. Certainly, the prisoner was glad to be leaving, as he made clear while taking a final walk around the castle’s grounds. For upon encountering the 9-year-old son of the castle’s master gunner, marching up and down a battlement with a wooden sword, he asked the boy what he was doing with ‘that terrible weapon’. When the lad replied that he was defending the king ‘from all your enemies’, the response was a warm one. ‘I am going away from here and do not respect to return,’ he replied, before patting his protector on the head and giving him the ruby ring that held his cravat. Nor, indeed, would his imminent departure prevent him from further attempts at flight thereafter, as he had already made clear to Titus on 22 May. ‘Assure all my friends in my name,’ he confided, ‘that if … there shall be any Treaty made me by the Parliamentary party I would only have use of it in order to my escape.’

Even by then, however, Charles had received further cruel tidings. For between 17 and 19 August, after a hurried march north, Cromwell had brilliantly routed the much larger Scottish army of the Duke of Hamilton at Preston. At a cost of fewer than 100 casualties, Parliamentarian forces had either killed, wounded or captured some 8,000 enemy troops, and to compound his agony, the news of this defeat would be blurted out while the king was at bowls with none other than Hammond. After a brooding silence, Charles could not help turning to the Governor and complaining that this was the worst news that ever came to England, provoking the not unjustifiable response that if Hamilton had been the victor, he would soon have controlled the thrones of both England and Scotland. ‘You are mistaken,’ came the royal retort, ‘I could have commanded him back with the motion of my Hand.’

Nor was there any more consolation on offer elsewhere. With Scottish support neutralised, it was useless, for example, for Charles to look to France, where Cardinal Mazarin, deeply embroiled in continental peace negotiations, merely contented himself with maintaining polite relations with the English Parliament. When the Scots first crossed the border, he had prudently recalled his ambassador Montreuil from Edinburgh, and upon breaking his journey in London, Montreuil’s efforts to obtain an interview with the king at Carisbrooke had proven wholly ineffectual. For a pass from the House of Lords enabling him to visit the Isle of Wight had been promptly overruled by the Commons, and by the time that Colchester fell on 27 August, England’s second flash of civil war was already well and truly over. Henceforth, the king could rely only on his wits in securing some small scrap of respectability from what he openly described to Titus as ‘a mocke Treaty’.

With his familiar flair for casuistry, Charles could continue, of course, to stretch the resources of his enemies, riven as they still were by rancour and division, though this is not to say that he entered the forthcoming negotiations at Newport in wholly bad faith. For in expressing his doubts to Hopkins about the prospects for the treaty, there remained fleeting undertones of hope. ‘I pray God, I be mistaken’ was his concluding observation on what he always considered the most likely outcome, but in one letter, penned on 18 August, he again implied to Hopkins that he was continuing to consider the possibility that talks might yet prove productive. ‘As for 64 [the treaty],’ he wrote, ‘if reall, 41 [the Prince of Wales] will doe nothing in prejudice.’ As late as 3 October, he was still instructing his eldest son to await the outcome of the treaty before employing force on his behalf. ‘As for my Directions to you at this time,’ Charles wrote, ‘the issue of this Treaty must be your chief Guide.’ In the meantime, his heir was to ‘cherish the Fleet as much as you may’ but ‘stay where you are, until you hear farther from me, or that you find you cannot hear from me’.

Ultimately, of course, it would take far more than human wit and paltry grains of goodwill to bridge the gulf between the king and his enemies. Yet throughout August and September, as both sides busied themselves with preliminaries, Charles was able to take some comfort at least from a relaxation in his physical circumstances. Before long, in fact, the original instructions to Hammond about the king’s imprisonment were being steadily dismantled by Parliament, and, after giving his parole for the duration of the treaty and twenty days thereafter, Charles was once more accorded the freedom to move within the island. On 31 August, moreover, he again submitted a request for the reinstallation of many of his former servants, and while Dowcett, Ashburnham and Legge were forbidden to return, others like Firebrace, Titus, Cresset and Captain Burroughs found themselves restored to their former duties. There was even a recall, indeed, for Mrs Wheeler, ‘with such maids as she shall choose’, including the faithful Mary, though Babbington, the king’s barber, found himself replaced for some reason by Thomas Davis at Charles’ own request.

When minor moral victories were so hard to come by, it was not altogether surprising, perhaps, that all those involved in the previous escape attempts, with the exception of Osborne – who is likely to have gone abroad – should have been included on the royal wish list of servants. On 22 August, Charles asked Firebrace to thank Cresset and Burroughs ‘for their Newes and bid them be confident that the King in Nomination of his attendents … will not forget one of those who were discharged for his sake’. In the interim, Firebrace was to ensure a steady flow of contact with the outside world, as Charles made clear to him on 29 August:

You being one of the Kings list I suppose you will repaire hither, wherfor I desyre you that before you come away, you leaue such order behinde you, as I may not loose my intelligence: desyre E: [Lady Carlisle] from me that speedely and carefully she send away those two letters I haue sent for M: and G: [the queen and Prince of Wales].

But while Charles was plainly still intent upon corresponding with his wife, nor had he forgotten his tie to the ever-faithful Jane Whorwood, who was now once more close by. Her first letters to him since her sojourn at Queenborough had arrived on 15 July, and two more followed four days later, along with one sent by the queen, from whom he had previously heard in May. By now, indeed, Jane was actually in residence at Hopkins’ house in the centre of Newport and ready to serve her sovereign in the new more intimate capacity already discussed, notwithstanding a letter to Firebrace, dated 27 July, in which she intimated that even her courage had initially faltered at the danger involved in the king’s invitation. ‘As to the satisfaction of him in the contents of it,’ she confided, ‘I could not soe suddenly challenge [produce] an answer’, adding that she ‘was willing to decline’ the king’s request until she had finally ‘in some sort acquir’d the meanes to do it’.

Doubtless, she was now making some effort to disguise her appearance, since her pock marks and in all likelihood her red hair were known to her pursuers, but it seems likely to have been only the assistance of Mrs Hopkins, who retained the guards’ – and presumably Hammond’s – confidence, that finally convinced Jane of the possibility of gaining access to the king. Her eventual arrival served, it seems, as a fillip to Charles’ spirits every bit as potent as the news of the impending treaty. In a letter to Colonel Nathan Rich, dated 9 August, Hammond noted how the king had ‘clipped his beard and asked the Governor if he saw a new reformation in him’. Furthermore, the flow of Charles’ messages to Jane became so torrential that she was soon experiencing difficulties in answering. ‘Tell N when you deliver this enclosed,’ he instructed Hopkins, ‘that I see she will in time learn to answer letters.’ On 17 August, there was further evidence of the urgency of the king’s wish to communicate with her. ‘My haste this day to return N a speedy answer,’ he told Hopkins, ‘made me slip something which since I have remembered, and therefore again I put you to this trouble hoping that by the morrow at night I shall have answer from her of both together.’ Three days later, he was playfully informing the headmaster in mock annoyance that:

[A]gainst [Jane] and your wife I have a quarrel for being here yesterday and not seeing me, but an easy satisfaction will content me though some I must have. For news I refer you to N expecting an answer from both you and her, by tomorrow morning before Noon.

Writing twice daily on occasion, Charles actually produced double the letters that Jane could manage in reply, uncomprehending, it seems, of the other pressing duties she was executing on his behalf, and telling her on 26 August, ‘that she shall have no more pardons without answering more punctually to my letters, beginning with this enclosed’.

In all likelihood, Jane’s access to the king was also eased by the fact that Hammond himself was at last beginning to relax at the prospect of his prisoner’s release from Carisbrooke, which, though eventually delayed until September, was nevertheless now imminent. Indeed, Newport town hall was already being prepared for the treaty negotiations, and Hopkins had made his own home at the grammar school available for the king to dwell in, ‘which by Mr Kinnersley of the wardrobe was fitted so well as such a place would afford, albeit of small receipt for the Court’. No doubt to Hammond’s considerable relief, too, extra troops had now been provided, as requested, and quarters reserved at the various inns for both parliamentary commissioners and royal attendants. To meet the expense, some £10,000 was borrowed from the City of London, while Hammond himself benefited to the tune of £500 a year from a personal pension that was now granted to him for services rendered. This was not the limit of his good fortune, for he was also allotted a further £1,000 in delinquency fines and treated to a payment from the army of £40 a week for the period of the treaty.

The Governor had confided to his friend Colonel Rich how he had been ‘impatient of my load and sought rest, but found none’. Though now free in principle to allow the king greater liberty, he had indeed proved disinclined at first to lessen his vigilance too drastically. He pressed Speaker Lenthall, for instance, to clarify his prisoner’s new privileges. Did they extend, on the one hand, to ‘horses and riding abroad’; and was Charles, for the time being, to be allowed ‘letters or any [person] whatever to come to him’? Since ‘I was not there’, he wrote, how was it possible to know the full extent of the king’s liberty at Hampton Court which he was now ordered to restore. Indeed, it was not until 27 August, when Charles finally offered guarantees of compliance, that Hammond achieved the ‘rest’ he was seeking. ‘His Majesty,’ he informed Lenthall subsequently, ‘is now free from restraint.’ The Royalist poet John Taylor, who had once described the Governor as ‘coarse, rigid and barbarous’, soon found himself encountering a changed man, newly relaxed and amenable in his altered circumstances – ‘a gentleman of quality [with] the humbleness of dutiful service’.

At Newport, meanwhile, the impact of Charles’ arrival would prove considerable. It was on 7 September that the royal coach, duly dusted down for the impending talks, eventually made its way from ‘Avalon’ – as some of the newsletters were now calling Carisbrooke – and on through the late summer hedges to the island’s capital for what would be the last political negotiation of the king’s life. Though the town awaiting him numbered no more than 3,000 inhabitants, it was nevertheless abuzz with expectancy, for in spite of its size, Newport was revelling in the new-found celebrity that matched its air of growing prosperity. A compact, well-ordered market town, living comfortably off its fisheries, leather-working and brewing trades, its streets were paved and its water mains freshly laid, while its older buildings, half-timbered and plaster-fronted, nestled proudly among newer shops and inns of bricks and timber. It had been a corporate borough for forty years by now, and its mayor and corporation were keener than ever to guard the privileges that dated back to the town’s original charter in the twelfth century. They were no less eager, of course, to enjoy the increased profits accruing from the arrival of so many troops and official newcomers, notwithstanding the fact that for the broader populace this also meant extra taxation ‘towardes the Charge imposed on the towne for the quartering of troopers & foote souldyers & for fier & Candle for them’.

Nor, it must be said, were all the new arrivals entirely desirable in their own right, for Newport’s hostelries were soon teeming with both high and low life from either side, and trouble swiftly escalated between Royalists on safe conducts and Parliamentarians claiming bragging rights after their ultimate victory. It had taken John Taylor four hours to cross Southampton Water to Cowes, before arriving in the capital ‘embroidered all over with mire and mud’. But he lost no time in voicing support for his ‘heroic and unconquered’ king, and denouncing those ‘buzzards of incredulity’ whom he found denouncing the royal touch for scrofula. ‘Here come many to this place,’ reported the Moderate Intelligencer on 10 September, ‘who look upon us, as if they desired the annihilation of all that have served the Parliament.’ On Sunday, 22 October, predictably enough, a footman of the king’s household twice came to blows with a Roundhead soldier, after which the George Inn witnessed even rowdier scenes than usual, as its Royalist patrons, who had already made the place notorious, celebrated the event. ‘That night,’ it was reported, ‘his Majesty’s Health went round lustily in the George-Seller, whither some of the Cooks and others came over from the Court.’

The George, indeed, would witness further disorder on 9 November when Cavaliers, angered by concessions forced upon the king, created such an uproar that four files of musketeers were eventually sent to arrest them and bring them before Hammond. When confronted, the troublemakers drew swords and pocket pistols – ‘insomuch’, we are told, ‘that a bloody conflict began to ensue’ – and fighting continued for half an hour before the troops stormed the room and sent the surviving occupants under escort up to Carisbrooke Castle. In all, five men – two Royalists and three Roundhead troopers – lost their lives, though many courtiers, it must be said, also took full advantage of the more gentle recreations offered by the island. For on St George’s Down, 1½ miles outside Newport, was a bowling green and ‘ordinary’, or social club, which had long been a happy haunt of local gentlemen and now found itself the resort of numerous well-heeled newcomers, whose richly adorned ladies self-consciously decked the capital’s streets, preening and posturing and eagerly competing to meet the king – though one at least, ‘conceitedly decked with black patches or ambitious spots on her face’, found herself snubbed by him for her brazenness.

In the meantime, general expectations for the treaty remained mixed. ‘Some are of opinion, little will be done, others contrary,’ reported the Moderate Intelligencer from Newport on 17 September. It was mainly left to Lord Lisle, one of the parliamentary commissioners, to cheer the optimists as best he might by producing a piece of prophecy, which received coverage in Mercurius Pragmaticus. For a curious Latin inscription and English couplet had, it seems, been found at Carisbrooke twelve years earlier and lately entered the peer’s possession. The couplet spoke of a king ‘cloth’d all in White’ who ‘shall crowne this land with Peace in th’ Isle of Wight’, but more significantly still from Lisle’s perspective, the numerals among the Latin inscription, when added together, came to 1648. In a credulous age where optimism of any kind was now more than ever at a premium, this alone was enough for hope – though not, it must be said, for all, and certainly not at Nunwell, where Sir John Oglander sounded an altogether more cynical note about the treaty’s prospects. ‘They tell us,’ he observed wryly, ‘… wee shale have Peace, and the Issue of blooud will be stopt, fayre weather, and all thinges accordinge to owr hartes desire.’

The foul weather that actually followed would indeed provide a better guide to the treaty’s eventual outcome than any prophecies or cryptic inscription conjured up by interested parties. For the rain was unabated, and while Charles nevertheless insisted upon equipping himself with riding boots in anticipation of enjoying the freedom of the island once more, the elements continued to frustrate. Thursday, 7 September, had in fact been designated a day of general thanksgiving for the victories of the Parliamentary armies, but Oglander’s description leaves little doubt of the limited meteorological scope for festivity of any kind:

It wase from morninge to Nyght, the horridst rayny Daye as ever I sawe, Insomuch as Insteed of reioycinge, many had heavy heartes, to see theyre Corne spoyled, and wisched it had bene a daye rather of humiliation, then of Joye, and Merriment, To Conclude there was almost no travelinge on the Earth, both by reason of the flouds and Bogges in the hygh wayes that the rayne, and travelinge made.

Nor was Oglander the only commentator to bemoan the late summer gloom, for John Taylor – known, appropriately enough, as the water poet by virtue of the fact that he was once a Thames boatman – again found himself the victim of the Cowes road, that ‘boggy quagmire, miry, rotten, filthy, dirty slow, through over, or into which I must pass’.

So soaked and windswept, indeed, were the parliamentary commissioners at the time of their arrival on Thursday, 14 September, that the volleys of shot and civic junketing on offer did nothing to prevent their creeping to bed at the earliest opportunity. Nor would a prayer drafted by the king at that very time have done anything to lift their spirits further. Not long before, he had experienced a lucky escape in a riding accident when he broke his bridle by reining in his horse too hard while travelling down a steep hill. But his close scrape had neither vanquished nor tempered his truculence, and in opting to treat Saturday as a fast day for the success of the treaty, he used the church service for the occasion as a means of delivering an invocation to the Almighty, loaded with accusation. ‘If the guilt of our great sins,’ his prayer ended, ‘cause this Treaty to break off in vain, Lord let the truth clearly appear who those men are, which under pretence of the publicke good doe pursue their own private ends.’

Somewhat less contentiously, there were also offerings of prayers from Parliament’s commissioners before they set out to commence treaty talks on Monday morning. Arriving at the town hall at 9 a.m., they then sent word to the king of their arrival and duly awaited his coach, accompanied by his attendants, ‘and His Footmen, and Coachman, with new suites laid with broad plate silver-lace, two in a Seame’. Whereupon the Parliamentary delegation proceeded to the treaty room and took up their places on either side of the lower end of a large negotiating table, and opposite the king who was to occupy a chair of state beneath a canopy at the table’s head, with his secretaries close at hand, discreetly lodged behind a curtain. Should the king wish to consult his advisers on any point, he was to be allowed to withdraw into a chamber, standing to one side of the treaty room – an arrangement which also applied to the Parliamentary representatives, who were given access to a similar vestibule.

For up to forty days – the pre-agreed limit for the talks – this setting would provide the backdrop for what promised to be the most fateful negotiations of the king’s life. Business was to be conducted by an exchange of papers rather than open discussion, and it was made clear to Charles on the opening day that, while the earlier propositions submitted to him at Hampton Court were to be the basis for discussion, priority must be given to four bills that Parliament considered crucial. They concerned the withdrawal of royal proclamations issued against Parliament during the war; the establishment of Presbyterianism; control of the militia; and the governance of Ireland. All were deep-seated bones of contention, raising issues that struck at the very core of Charles’ values and beliefs, and all were to be effectively non-negotiable, notwithstanding any residual displays of defiance the king might yet attempt. For although he had agreed by only the second day to cancel his wartime proclamations, he nevertheless deigned in his answer to omit a loaded phrase in the commissioners’ original proposal, in which they declared that Parliament had been ‘necessitated to undertake a War in their just and lawfull Defence’.

Once more, then, Charles was willing to dig in his heels – and to such a degree, in fact, that the Wednesday session developed into a heated wrangle, culminating in an adjournment without decision. As the king retired to his room, moreover, one of his secretaries accosted the commissioners’ leader, the Earl of Northumberland. ‘My good lord,’ he declared, ‘remember how gracious this good prince hath been to you, and do you compassionate his distresses, and the strait he is now in.’ ‘Sir,’ came the reply, ‘in this it is impossible for me to do any thing, for the king in this point is safe as king, but we cannot be so.’ Northumberland’s point was incontrovertible, for without such an acceptance of Parliament’s grounds for fighting, the risk would remain that the king might later find grounds for punishing his enemies. There could indeed be no scope for compromise, therefore, and though Charles continued to chafe, and postponement followed postponement, on 25 September he was finally forced to concede a position that he had never been capable, from the very outset, of maintaining realistically.

Even now, however, the main potential sticking point was still to come. For, after dinner that same evening, the commissioners settled down to draft their proposal on the future of the Church, which was both completed and delivered to Charles by 8 p.m. No more time had been needed, since the terms were so straightforward: the complete abolition of the episcopacy, and the establishment of the Presbyterian Directory of Worship in place of the king’s beloved Book of Common Prayer. On this occasion, too, there was to be not the slightest scope for resistance, as Charles himself appeared to acknowledge when he told the Bishop of London and his other advisers next day that ‘the Parliaments commissioners stand upon positives’ and would insist upon ‘a positive answer to things whither he will pass them or not’. Two days later, moreover, he was proved right, for his desultory attempt to circumvent the religious issue by suggesting that all outstanding issues be settled by direct negotiation with Parliament in London was swiftly and roundly rejected.

The king’s delaying tactics were by now, of course, a wholly familiar and thoroughly worn-out option, and on Friday, 29 September, the commissioners arrived at 10 a.m. to confirm as much, freshly buoyed by news that Cromwell had crossed the Scottish border and that the English fleet, duly restored to loyal service, had sailed for Holland to attack the Prince of Wales’ would-be armada. Though they were left to cool their heels for most of the day, by 4.30 p.m. they had delivered the following response: ‘We humbly desire Your Majesty’s Answer to our Paper concerning the Church, delivered in to Your Majesty the 25th of this instant September.’ One more week of hair-splitting would follow over the issue of episcopal lands and the virtues of the Book of Common Prayer, but by the time that Governor Hammond invited the commissioners to dinner at Carisbrooke on 6 October, all seemed largely over. Four days earlier, Parliament had rejected an appeal, delivered by Titus, for direct talks in London, and when the increasingly weary round of talks reopened on Saturday, draft after draft of the king’s reply on religion was discarded until he was finally reduced to tears.

All Charles might now hope for, it seemed, was one last attempt at escape, and as he retired to his room, thoroughly exhausted by a day of frustrated negotiation and an evening absorbed by touching visitors for the ‘King’s Evil’, he confirmed his intentions in the following letter to Hopkins, dated 7 October:

Though I doubt not of your Care in expediting that business, whereof I spoke to you this morning; yet I cannot but tell you, that you cannot make reddy too soon, for, by what I have heard since I saw you, I fynde that few dayes will make that impossible, which now is fesible; wherefore I pray you, give me an account as soone as you can; First, where I shall take Boate? (spare not my walking, in respect of security). Then, how the Tydes fall out? or whither, incase the Wynde do serve, it be necessary to looke to the Tydes? what Winds are faire? what may serve? & what are contrary? Consider also, if a Pass from 50 [Hammond] may not be usefull. Lastly, how soone all will be reddy. To all this a speedy Answer is expected.

His word of honour that he would not escape was plainly no more binding than ever, when, from his perspective, the sole beneficiary was an ungodly enemy, and as he listened next day to the Dean of Canterbury expostulating drearily on the lessons of John 5:14 during morning service, Charles’ mind was doubtless preoccupied with his latest project.

In the meantime, as was made clear to Hopkins on 8 October, every effort would have to be made to lull the commissioners into a false sense of optimism. ‘You will hear to Morrow,’ Charles revealed, ‘that I have given full Satisfaction concerning the Militia, with which I have acquainted no living Soul but yourself.’ A fresh breeze of compromise and accommodation was soon seen to be sweeping through other areas of negotiation. Having agreed to consider Parliament’s proposals on Ireland, Charles even produced a somewhat more forthcoming response on the thorny issue of the Church, which caused John Crew, one of the commissioners, to rush off a hasty letter to the Derby House Committee. Once Parliament’s attitude on the other proposals had been finally confirmed, Crew suggested, a definitive agreement on the Church would not be long in following. The ever-watchful Venetian correspondent in London was equally confident of Charles’ new preparedness to compromise. ‘The ease with which he gives way to the determination of Parliament,’ wrote the Italian, ‘[was] giving hope of a speedy conclusion.’

Yet Charles was all the while urging Hopkins ‘to haste the work I have set you upon’. ‘Lose no time and give daily an Account how you proceed therein,’ he wrote on 8 October, before freely acknowledging on the following day the double game he had been playing:

Notwithstanding my too great Concessions alreaddy made, I know, that unless I shall make yet others, which will directly make me no King; I shall be, at best, a perpetuall Prisoner: besydes if this were not, (of which I am too sure) the adhering to the Church, (from which I cannot depart, no not in show) will doe the same: &, to deale freely with you, the great Concession I made this day, was meerely in order to my escape of which, if I had not hope, I would not have done: for then I could have returned, to my straight Prison, without reluctancy, but now I confess it would breake my hart, having done that, which only an escape can justefy. To be shorte, if I stay for a demonstration of their further wickedness, it will be too late to seeke a remedy; for my only hope is; that now they belive that I dare deny them nothing, & so be less carefull of their Guards: wherefore, as you love my safety; let us dispach this business as soone as we can, without expecting Newes from London; & lett me tell you, that if I were once aboard, & under saile, I would willingly enufe, hazard the 3 Pinaces; To conclude, I pray you belive me, (& not the common voice of Mankynde), that I am lost if I doe not Escape, which I shall not be able to doe, if (as I have said) I stay for further demonstrations; therefore for Gods sake hasten with all diligence you can.

Certainly, the final sentences betrayed a new desperation, indicating for the first time, perhaps, a man now nearing breaking point. Just under a year ago, he had left his pet greyhound whimpering in his chamber at Hampton Court, and for all of eighteen months before that, he had been a prisoner in his own kingdom, resisting what now appeared inevitable even to him. From this point forward, therefore, as he admitted to Firebrace, he was bent on granting ‘whatever they could aske, saving his Conscience and the damnation of his owne Soule (wch his Matie once told me, he thought they aymed at)’. Nor, it seems, was Charles’ assessment of his plight a matter of histrionics, as he made clear to Hopkins the following afternoon, before a treaty session due to commence at 4 p.m. ‘What I wrote yesternight,’ he confided, ‘was not to ad Spurs, but really to give you the true state of my condition.’ Clearly, the point of make or break had at last been reached, and everything now depended upon the Prince of Wales in Holland. ‘The procuring of a Dutch Pinck, would make all sure,’ Charles reflected.

Even Jane Whorwood, for that matter, was now to be excluded from his escape plans. ‘Upon my word,’ he told Hopkins in a postscript to his letter of 9 October, ‘N. knows nothing of this Business, nor shall: not out of any mistrust, (for I cannot be more confident of any), but to keep my Rule, of not putting such a great Secret as this, than is of absolute Necessity.’ Seven days later, his exhortations to Hopkins were becoming more impatient than ever. ‘The Businesses of the Church and my Friends come so fast upon me,’ he told the schoolmaster, ‘that I cannot promise you a Week; therefore lose no time.’ Next day, indeed, he was more emphatic still. He wrote after supper that evening:

Excuse my impatience that I desire you to give me an account where the business sticks; for I assure you, that I shall have but few Days free to Act my Part. I need say no more; but let me know what is possible to be done, and then it is for me to judge.

His friends abroad, he added to Hopkins, ‘desire my Freedom (if it be possible) more than myself; being confident thereby in a great measure, to alter the Face of Affairs’.

Ostensibly at least, there was still time enough for action, since Sundays and the designated monthly Fast day were not included in the forty days allowed for the treaty, and talks would not therefore end officially until 3 November. On 4 November, moreover, it was actually decided by Parliament that negotiations should continue for another fourteen days, though the pealing of bells throughout the island when news of the extension became known proved premature. For the extra two weeks of talk proffered not so much the prospect of peace but merely an added opportunity for Hopkins to make good the king’s escape before he could be transferred back to Carisbrooke once more. In a letter written on 9 November, the schoolmaster duly confirmed that John Newland was once again to be relied upon for the supply of a boat, notwithstanding certain doubts expressed about his honesty, which were shared, it seems, by Charles himself, who nevertheless recommended that the merchant be trusted ‘without any more Tryals than to know of him how he can pass the Examination of the Sea Guards’. ‘Though you dare not be too confident (for which I cannot blame you) of Newland,’ he wrote, ‘… I cannot thinke any Man so great a Divel, as to betray me: when it is visible that he will gaine more for being Honnest then being a Knave.’

Three days later, meanwhile, Charles was asking to be informed ‘of the Tydes and of the Horse Guards both how they are placed and what Rounds they ride’, notwithstanding the fact that in spite of his best efforts on this occasion, he had yet again been found out. For in a letter from Newport dated 6 November, the Derby House Committee had already heard of ‘a design laid for the conveying of his Majesty’s person away’. This time the committee had more exact knowledge of the scheme, which they conveyed to Hammond on 13 November:

We have information from a good hand that there is an intention for the King to make escape; the time to be on Thursday night or Friday night; That he intends to land on this side at Gosport; that only two are to be in his company, a little ancient man with a shrivelled face, and a lusty young man of about 26 or 27 years of age.

Whether Newland was indeed the ‘good hand’ who had told all remains unknown. But the committee was certainly able to supply Hammond with further details on 18 November:

To escape all suspicion from you, he [the king] intends to walk out a mile or two, as usuall, in the day time, and there horses are laid in the isle to carry him to a boat. If he cannot do this, then either over the house in the night, or at some private window in the night, he intends his passage.

But Jack Ashburnham, at least, would suggest that it was not so much betrayal as reluctance to assist that finally put paid to the king’s escape. For Ashburnham had, it seems, received orders from Charles ‘to provide a Barque at Hastings in readiness to carry Him into France, and to send horses againe to Netley, and lay others betweene that place and my House [near Battle]’. ‘But within twenty dayes or thereabout,’ Ashburnham’s Narrative reveals, ‘His Majestie sent mee the Relation of his Condition, which Hee expressed to be very melancholy, some persons very neare Him having refusd to serve Him in His escape, and so gave mee order to discharge the Barque and horses that waited for Him.’

Typically enough, the king would display little compunction when he eventually explained his intended breach of parole in a letter addressed ‘to all my people of whatsoever station quality or condition’, which he had planned to leave behind him after his escape was made. Probably written just before 16 November, it was a characteristic piece of self-justification, neatly omitting the duplicity which he openly admitted in his correspondence with Hopkins, and excusing his own broken promise by emphasising the allegedly broken promises of his captors:

And certainly my condition in point of freedom is farre different from what it was at Hampton Court. Witness the strict guard round about this Island, and the troop of horse always attending, or rather watching me when I go abroad.

Since therefore, none of these conditions are kept to me upon which I gave my word, I cannot be truly said to break it, though I seek my freedom. Besides, the Governor made me declare before the Commissioners, that continuation of guards upon me freed me from my word, whereupon he took away the sentinels at my door, but never moved those of more importance, which was enough to confess the truth of what I declared, but not sufficient to take away the justness of my plea which cannot be avoided, except by the total taking away my guards, the difference of a few paces position, nearer or farther off, not making me less a prisoner.

The sentries to which Charles took exception had been posted outside his bedchamber in Newport’s grammar school, which still stands as a private residence in St James’s Street at the corner of Lugley Street. But according to testimony presented by Hammond in a letter to the Speaker of the House of Lords dated 7 November, the king was, at best, telling no more than half the truth. Fearing in advance that the posting of guards might be used by Charles as a pretext for breaking his word, Hammond had indeed, it seems, pressed the king for his opinions and found him prepared ‘to make scruple’ over the issue. Yet Hammond was also at pains to suggest that the guards had only been set ‘to keep off People from pressing into his Lodgings’ and ‘to preserve his Majesty’s person from violence’. Thereafter, the Governor explained:

He [Charles] concluded himself to be obliged by his Parole if the said Centinels were taken away: which I then promised should be done before the Commissioners. And accordingly it was immediately observed.

Ultimately, the whole issue of Charles’ promise would be largely mitigated by the fact that no actual escape attempt was ever forthcoming, and by 6 November, John Crew was still hopeful of the king’s good faith. ‘We shall use our uttmost endeavours here,’ he informed John Swinfen of the Derby House Committee, ‘to bring the King nearer the Houses, and you will doe good service at London in perswading the house to come nearer to the King.’ But two weeks later, Jane Whorwood was making the case for his escape more urgently than ever. Hearing of ominous stirrings within the army, she had managed to obtain a pass to revisit the Isle of Wight on 21 November, having already warned Charles of a plot ‘to dispose of his M:’. The feeling among his friends in the City, she told him, was that the king should ‘thoroughly concede, to prevent Dangers incumbing’. But her own advice to Charles was escape, for as she herself put it, ‘if Good be not intended him, no condescension of his can abort it’. He should make his bid for freedom, moreover, ‘on Thursday or Friday next’ and ‘not from the top of the House by the help of Ladders’, which had been urged ‘by some near him’, but ‘by all meanes out of some Door’.

It was not the first time that the advice from Charles’ ‘most affectionate Hellen’, as she signed herself, was ignored. Perhaps, as Ashburnham suggested, it was a lack of enthusiasm amongst his other friends that had left him unwilling to take the risk, or, more likely, a combination of weariness and submission to the inevitable that finally blunted his enthusiasm. He had failed so often and for so long that even defeat may now have seemed preferable, so long as it afforded him fleeting repose of a kind. Certainly, when he addressed the commissioners on Saturday, 25 November, as treaty talks finally broke up, there was little evidence of that obdurate defiance that had sustained him over many long months. Instead, there was merely resignation, self-pity and a pallid warning to his enemies of the consequences of their actions:

My Lords, you are come to take your leave of me and I believe we shall scarce ever see each other again, but God’s will be done, I thanke God, I have made my peace with him, and shall without feare, undergoe what he shall be pleased to suffer men to doe unto me. My Lords, you cannot but know that in my fall and ruine, you may see your owne and that also neere to you; I pray God send you better friends than I have found.

At the outset of talks, Charles had seemed renewed. ‘The king is wonderfully improved’, noted the Earl of Salisbury, as his sovereign assumed once more the trappings of royalty. The royal coachmen had been furnished with new livery, and orders issued from the king’s pen with new confidence and vigour, as he encouraged efforts to discover silver in Somerset, requested a favour from the Governor of Newfoundland, granted safe conducts to John Kerckhoven and Lady Stanhope to return to England and appointed Sir Simonds D’Ewes keeper of the royal libraries and medal collection. Even his healing powers had gained a new efficacy, it seemed, when Elizabeth Steben, a 16-year-old gentlewoman from Winchester, claimed her sight had been much improved after being touched by the royal hand.

But by the time that Parliament’s commissioners finally returned to Westminster on 27 November carrying an agreement loaded with concessions that he had hitherto resisted so resolutely, Charles was now an altered man. Ultimately, he had submitted to thirty-eight demands in return for four of his own, and in doing so he had agreed to restrictions on the power of the monarchy and modifications to the Church of England far greater than any proposed in 1641, or even in the years immediately after the outbreak of war. The king’s precious bishops were to be abrogated for three years, after which a committee of sixty divines was to settle the religious complexion of the kingdom. On 9 October, he had surrendered control of the militia for twenty years, doing the same for the government of Ireland only two days later. On no more than the issue of a pardon for his supporters had Charles enjoyed any notable success, significantly reducing the number of those excluded, though even this could not temper the outrage of his followers at the George Inn, who once again required four ranks of Roundhead musketeers to quell their outrage.

Confessing to his son of a ‘great trouble of mind’, the king had at one point, according to Sir Philip Warwick’s account, turned his back to his advisers, lest they witnessed his tears. This was not the only sign of its kind. For upon another evening, when the day’s business was under review, Charles’ pet greyhound, Gipsy, scratched against the door and was let in by Warwick, who proceeded, in all innocence, to ask whether his sovereign preferred greyhounds to spaniels. ‘Yes,’ came the reply, ‘for they equally love their masters, yet they do not flatter them so much.’ In growing desolation, the king compared himself elsewhere to the commander of a fort ordered to hold to the last man and thereby turn his defences into his own tomb, though in his more peevish moments, he was still inclined to blame those close to him. ‘I wish I had consulted nobody but my own self,’ he declared before Warwick, ‘for then, when in honour or conscience I could not have complied, I could have easily been positive; for with Job I would have chosen misery than ruin.’ Where there had once been pride, fortitude and confidence in ultimate victory, there was now only fatalism, born of the realisation that greater, less tolerant forces were about to consume him. ‘The commissioners are gone; the corn is now in the ground; we expect the harvest,’ he had told his son on 29 November; and surely enough, only two days later, the seed proved ripe for reaping.

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