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‘For now, it is only the question I shall be a prisoner in England or Scotland. I think to be better used in England, though I have more friends in Scotland.’
Charles I, 15 January 1647
Since at least September, the king had fully recognised the limits of his Scottish captors’ patience and that, if frustrated, they would have little hesitation ultimately in handing him over to Parliament. Yet when a group of parliamentary commissioners, consisting of Lords Pembroke, Denbigh and Montague and six MPs, reached Newcastle on 23 January – their horses ‘scarce able to hold out’ after the long journey – he proceeded to treat them as though he had some choice in the matter, receiving them like petitioners in his Presence Chamber and graciously hearing their message before dismissing them almost casually with the bland assurance that they would have his response after due consideration. Upon their meeting, he had held out his hand to be kissed, ‘with affability’, and ‘seemed very well pleased’ with the news that the delegation had been instructed ‘to receive the person of the King from the Scots army, and to serve him during the journey’ to his house at Holdenby, 60 miles north of London in Northamptonshire. Thoroughly at ease and displaying no hint of malice before a ‘full thronged’ audience, Charles made clear, too, that all were ‘very welcome’, since ‘none of them were strangers to him’, and that their business was ‘no less welcome’ than they. Eager now ‘to remove jealousies and distrusts, and establish a right understanding betwixt him and his two Houses of Parliament’, the king even exchanged some ‘mirthful passages’ with the deputation’s head, the Earl of Pembroke, who had so often entertained him at Wilton in the far-off, carefree days of the 1630s.
Still, however, it was not too late for Charles to avoid being handed over to the English. If, as the Scots urged, he was finally to embrace Presbyterianism, he might yet be taken with them to the safety of his northern kingdom. Otherwise, as they made clear with their familiar candour, he would surely be forced to endure the ‘strictness’ of the English Independents, who would not only deprive him ‘of the consolation of receiving the queen’s letters and of the visits of his friends’, but also treat him like a criminal, posting a watchman ‘to sleep in his bedroom’ every night – something especially irksome to Charles, since he ‘disliked having strangers about him’. But though the threats were compelling, they failed to achieve the desired effect. On the contrary, the king remained adamant, as Montreuil recorded, ‘that he would never give his consent’, since ‘what was asked of him was equally opposed to his peace of conscience and the welfare of his people’. Instead, he would abide with quiet confidence in the fond belief that all would end favourably and the firm conviction that his subjects could never manage without him. Earlier, on 27 October, he had informed Jermyn, Culpepper and Ashburnham that the balance of power between the English and Scots remained in his hands and that, without his authority, ‘the two nations must needs fall out’. This remained his view even now. ‘Without my establishing,’ he declared, ‘there can be no peace.’
In Paris, meanwhile, the queen, who had believed until now that the Scots would never abandon their king, shared none of her husband’s optimism. Indeed, she wept every day, overcome by the ‘unhappy case’ of her husband, who ‘finds himself abandoned by all before the gates of a prison’. In desperation, she considered a trip to Ireland to muster support for the Royalist cause and toyed once more with the option of retiring to a monastery, though her ultimate destination proved to be Austria, where she complained ‘with bitter tears’ to her sister-in-law, Anne, of ‘the conditions of herself and her husband’ and laid the blame for their misfortunes upon France. The French ministers, she declared, had deceived her with empty promises ‘of the great things they would do’ when peace arrived once more in Europe, only for these ‘long delayed hopes’ to reduce both her and her husband ‘to the utmost extremity’. She had no faith in Charles’ continued hope that, once in English hands, the Scots would back down and ‘do for him … what they have refused to do when they had him with them’. Nor, it seems, was there any trust in his conviction that those same servants who had failed to liberate him at Newcastle would somehow ‘deliver him from Holdenby’.
In the event, Charles was simply left to prepare hurriedly for the latest stage of his restless odyssey. Some four days after their arrival, the parliamentary commissioners repeated their wish that ‘orders might be given’ for the king’s departure, and in the meantime he had destroyed all those papers that ‘he could not without some risk of harm carry away with him’. Writing to the Marquis of Ormonde in Ireland, the very last place where his supporters still held sway, Charles ordered him to follow the queen’s and the prince’s direction, and not to stick at anything ‘for want of legal power from the king’. There was a last letter, too, for Henrietta Maria, which confirmed the scale of his predicament. On the one hand, she must believe no future message from him unless it was delivered by an individual of unquestionable loyalty. Nor, at the same time, was she to allow Prince Charles to come to England, no matter what ‘threats or entreaties’ Parliament might make and irrespective of any fears of her own that she might harbour for him.
Now, most of the old servants who had waited on him at Oxford were to be dismissed, and others – who had neither ‘assisted in this unnatural war against Parliament’ nor ‘adhered to the enemy’ – appointed in their place. Nine in number, the leading members of the king’s new household consisted of Colonel Thomas Herbert and James Harrington, Grooms of the Bedchamber; Sir Fulke Greville, Gentleman Usher of the Privy Chamber and Cup Bearer; Captain Anthony Mildmay, Gentleman Usher of the Privy Chamber and Carver; Captain Middleton, Gentleman Usher of the Privy Chamber and Sewer; Mr Anstey, Gentleman Usher Daily Waiter; Mr Babbington, Groom of the Privy Chamber and Barber; Mr John Joyner, Master Cook; and Dr Wilson, physician. All, naturally, were loyal Parliamentarians and men of manners and good character who could be relied upon to serve the king with all due respect to his rank. Indeed Joyner, in particular, came with the special recommendation of the House of Commons, since he had served as a captain of distinction in the Parliamentary army. Though the post of cook might therefore seem unworthy of his previous status, he clearly gave good service in this capacity, for he and Herbert alone remained among the king’s retainers until his death.
Less conspicuous among the king’s new attendants, but in the longer run more significant than most, was a certain Henry Firebrace, who had accompanied Lord Denbigh as his secretary and would come in the months ahead to perform a key role as a double agent, acting ostensibly as a guard whilst secretly ensuring transit of the king’s correspondence and assisting in later escape attempts. He recorded later in his Narrative:
Being at Newcastle when the Scots delivered his Majestie to the English, I did (by his directions, to the end that I might with greater Freedome, and less suspition of those, who had him in Custodie) make my application to some of the commissioners that I might be admitted to attend his Majestie as one of the pages of his Bedchamber in which I prevailed.’
Born in 1619 or 1620, the sixth son of Robert Firebrace of Derby and Susan Jerome of Kegworth, Leicestershire, ‘honest Harry Firebrace’ had been educated at Repton until the age of 14 before his family moved to London and he was apprenticed to Richard Green, a scrivener of All Hallows, Barking. It was the coming of war in 1642, however, that suddenly and decisively changed Firebrace’s life, when his sister Rebecca, through the influence of her patroness Lady Villiers, managed to secure a place for him as Lord Denbigh’s ‘Secretary to the Counsells of War’. Like Denbigh himself a monarchist at heart, the young man thus found himself uneasily attached to a Parliamentarian cause that he would not hesitate to abandon when opportunity arose. That opportunity had now arisen in the most unexpected and significant of fashions, for Denbigh, it seems, had hoped through Firebrace’s presence in the royal household to persuade the king to make concessions to Parliament which might preserve the monarchy, or, if this failed, to place Firebrace close enough to the king to assist, if necessary, in saving his life.
Already, then, the king’s affairs were entering a new, more critical, more clandestine phase: a point where unrelenting vigilance, espionage, counter-espionage, ciphers, codes and other cloak-and dagger dealings would be constant features. For while Charles I’s everyday world had shrunk to a fragment of its former scale, it remained a crucial microcosm upon which the broader political universe still hinged, with the predictable result that its membership became a matter of considerable hard-bargaining. On 1 February, for instance, two days before his departure for the queen’s former house at Holdenby, Charles requested, according to the Moderate Intelligencer, that some of his former attendants be retained. ‘Might he not,’ he asked, ‘have old servants go along with him and sometimes cast his eye upon if not serve him?’ Accordingly, Patrick Maule and James Maxwell were allowed to remain in their old posts as Grooms of the Bedchamber – ‘in which place they had many years faithfully served the king’ – while one day later, after they had waited on him at dinner, the others ‘kissed his Majesty’s hand and with great expressions of grief for their dismiss, poured forth their prayers for his Majesty’s freedom and preservation and so departed’.
This, however, by no means ended the chess-game process of framing the king’s circle of servants. For along with a Clerk of the Avery named Preston, whose task was to supply oats and fodder for the king’s horses, a Eurieman and Clerk of the Mouth called John Burroughs, who among other things was to tend the king’s table linen, a Cellarman called Lewen, and a Butteryman and Undercook named Catchaside and Andrew respectively, there were also three other figures of much more considerable long-term importance: Francis Cresset, who was appointed the king’s Steward and Treasurer; Captain Silius Titus, who became his Equerry and was given £150 for the upkeep of his horses; and Abraham Dowcett, who was installed Clerk of the Kitchen and entrusted with £100 to provide for the king’s diet. ‘His Majestie hath now other maner of Table and attendance than formerly,’ reported one news-sheet at this time, ‘a great many honest godly courtiers and good soldiers, Mr Herbert, Sir Fulke Grevill, Captain Mildmay, Carver, Mr Harrington of the bedchamber, Mr Dowcett, Captain Titus, Equerry, etc.’ But the writer is likely to have expressed altogether less satisfaction if he had known those cited more fully. For Dowcett and Titus were later to transfer their allegiance wholly to the king’s side – taking an active role in smuggling his private correspondence and organising plans for his escape – while Cresset, like Firebrace, was already a secret Royalist.
The very same day that these appointments were made, indeed, there occurred a fleeting glimpse of things to come when one of the king’s old servants, a certain Mungo Murray, took leave of the king for his home in Scotland. For while Murray knelt to kiss his sovereign’s hand on parting, Charles was seen to slip something into his grasp, after which the Scotsman was accordingly followed, stopped and searched. He had been carrying, it seems, a letter addressed to Montreuil, and was subsequently kept in custody for two days before being released on security. Even so, Murray had become one of the early victims of the game of cat and mouse that would be played out ever more desperately in the coming months. His message, like the many others that were later intercepted, was taken to Parliament for decoding, and though Charles did not make their task easy, the cryptographers involved were never, it seems, unequal to their task. In each case, the coded letters, many of which still survive, consisted of rows of numerals, each denoting a letter, syllable or word, while blank numerals, or ‘nulls’, were inserted at intervals to render the deciphering process more difficult. For extra security, the king also kept a different cipher for each correspondent, and frequently changed the cipher even when writing to the same correspondent, though this had not prevented the Oxford mathematician, Dr John Wallis, from decrypting the letters famously captured at Naseby, and nor would it foil Wallis’ successors.
In the meantime, however, the Scots at least had no more need for such murky dealings. For on the morning of Saturday, 30 January 1647, they paraded their entire cavalry through the centre of Newcastle, then on past Anderson House and out into the countryside. By the afternoon there were just 500 soldiers in the town, ready to hand over to the 500 English soldiers who duly arrived at 2 p.m. It was, we are told, a ‘friendly and brotherly parting’ on the Scottish side, with the troops under strict orders not ‘to plunder any houses, drive away any goods, nor exact … any moneys or provision’, though Newcastle’s townsfolk were unassuaged by any parting show of goodwill. For them the Scots were ‘nothing but Jews’, ‘people who had sold their king and their honour’, and doughty local fishwives cried ‘Judas’ as the Scots passed by, pipes skirling, while Charles himself added to the biblical theme by taunting his former captors with the jibe that they had sold him ‘at too cheap a rate’. Such, indeed, was the level of passion from all directions that newly arrived English officers were said to have been forced to ‘blows and threats, to prevent the women of this town from following the Scottish troops and throwing stones at them while they were leaving’.
Inside Anderson House, meanwhile, the Scots’ commissioners were taking an apologetic leave of the king. Some, indeed, had tears in their eyes as they told him ‘that as he had failed to sign the proposals and treaties, they were obliged to hand him over to the English’. But Charles was predictably unmoved by their professions of regret. Instead, he told them roundly that their refusal to receive him in Scotland was of no importance, ‘as even if he had been at liberty, he would rather have gone to those who bought than to those who sold him’, though the show of bravado was short-lived, for as the Scots withdrew, their English counterparts ‘at once set their guards’. From now on the king’s captors were ordered by their superiors at Westminster that they were not ‘to allow any letter or paper to be given to him that they had not previously seen’. In consequence, the regular correspondence with his wife that had so far sustained Charles would have to be conducted through secret intermediaries, and while the niceties of his regal status would continue to be observed at Holdenby, his enemies seemed adamant that he would have to remain there ‘always’, a perpetual prisoner, ‘until he has granted everything’.
Yet Charles’ departure from Newcastle – more than nine months after his escape from Oxford – nevertheless offered not only welcome relief from a period of unremitting gloom, but even reassurance of a kind. Accompanied by the parliamentary commissioners, their staff and the newly constituted royal household, and escorted by 900 horse, he left on 3 February. The journey of some 160 miles to Holdenby would prove, to all intents and purposes, a veritable royal progress of the old style, passing through Durham, Richmond, Ripon, Leeds, Rotherham, Nottingham and Leicester, with people flocking to see their monarch, pressing forward to be ‘touched’ for healing of the ‘Evil’, as the disease of scrofula was then known, and greeting him with cries of joy and prayers for his preservation. For all of 2 miles outside Leeds, indeed, the roads were lined with well-wishers, while at Nottingham none other than General Fairfax, his old adversary, stood ready to honour him. Nowhere, it seems, were the onlookers given ‘any check or disturbance’ by the soldiers – ‘a civility his Majesty was well pleased with’ – and the journey as a whole, which lasted a total of thirteen days, proved a much-needed tonic to the king’s careworn spirits, ‘causing many a smile from his princely countenance’. Just as in freer times, it seems, when he had cheerfully moved from one hunting lodge to another, a change of venue had always lifted the king’s spirits, and now was no exception.
At Holdenby itself, meanwhile, painstaking preparations had been made for the king’s arrival. By the direction of a Committee of both Houses, Clement Kinnersley, the Yeoman of his Majesty’s Wardrobe, had been sent from London with a party of workmen to superintend the fitting of the residence with ‘hangings, bedding and other wardrobe stuffe and necessaries’. Upon his arrival, Charles found himself greeted by the Northamptonshire gentry, notwithstanding the county’s well-known Puritan sympathies, as well as ‘others of ordinary rank’ who ‘stood ready there, to welcome the King, with joyful countenances and prayers’. There awaited him, too, lavish provision for his dietary requirements, since he had been granted an allowance of twenty-eight dishes at £30 per day, which was every bit as generous as he had enjoyed in his earlier pomp. Indeed, a household staff of 120 servants brought him everything he needed, except, of course, his freedom – which was denied by a substantial garrison costing £282 a day under the command of Major-General Browne and Colonel Graves – and the consolation of his own Anglican chaplain, of which Parliament had seen fit to deprive him. Ultimately, the king would refuse to attend the prescribed Presbyterian services, spending Sundays alone in his room in prayer, study and contemplation, and when the appointed Presbyterian ministers, Reverends Marshall and Carrill, said grace, Charles would respond by intoning his own Anglican blessing.
Aside from such irritants, however, the king would spend his time at Holdenby in comparative comfort. Re-establishing the ordered life that was always his preference, he read for two to three hours each day, played chess and took vigorous walks with Major-General Browne and the Earl of Pembroke, who invariably struggled to keep stride with the king’s rapid pacing up and down the long gravel walk in Holdenby’s garden. There was opportunity, too, for him to indulge his particular enthusiasm for bowls, resulting in rides to Lord Vaux’s house at Harrowden, around 9 miles away, where ‘there was a good bowling-green with gardens, groves and walks that afforded much pleasure’, and the Earl of Sunderland’s house at the nearer location of Althorpe, ‘where also there was a green well kept’. Not altogether surprisingly under such circumstances, Charles soon appeared in excellent health, eating abstemiously at meals, drinking only a little beer and ‘wine and water mixt’, and enjoying especially good relations with one of his new keepers, Thomas Herbert – a quiet, unassuming character who, as the king’s constant companion, eventually gained his complete trust and what may well be considered affection.
Born in York in 1606, Herbert came in fact from a family of merchants and aldermen, who enjoyed not only significant status in their own right but a crucial connection with the Herbert earls of Pembroke. His grandfather had been Governor of the Merchant Adventurers’ Company and Lord Mayor of York in 1573, and in 1627 Herbert himself benefited from the 3rd Earl of Pembroke’s patronage to serve under Sir Dodmore Cotton on a three-year journey to India, Africa and Persia. The result was an extraordinary book, entitled A Relation of Some Yeares Travaile Begunne Anno 1626 into Afrique and the Greater Asia, which won him lasting fame after its publication in 1634, as perhaps the foremost travel writer of the seventeenth century. Filled with remarkable sketches of dodos, broad-billed parrots, cuneiform inscriptions, the ruins of Persepolis and a host of other curiosities, Herbert’s account also displays all the wonder of a young man marvelling at erotic wall paintings in New Julfa or the size of the Shah Abbas’ moustache, while revealing at one and the same time a number of keen insights into the many admirable aspects of his own personality as he bounces around, fever-ridden, on the back of a camel, but refuses to turn his thieving nurse over to the Persian authorities for fear of what they might do to her.
Thereafter, he had returned to England by 1634 and retired from court to his Tintern estate, only to re-emerge with the outbreak of the Civil War, during which he served on Parliament’s side and performed with sufficient distinction to achieve his appointment in the newly constituted royal household – a role requiring every ounce of his energy, dedication, patience and self-effacing discretion, since it was well known that the king had taken it ‘very ill that his old servants were taken from him’. At Newcastle, indeed, Charles had not hesitated to use sharp words with some of the new ones, and Herbert’s trepidation at his first interview with his new master, which he relates in his account of his service during the years of the king’s captivity, was palpable. Both Herbert and his fellow Groom of the Bedchamber, Sir James Harrington, had in fact been refused access to the king after their initial appointment, and it was only some time afterwards that the former was eventually escorted into Charles’ presence by James Maxwell after dinner one night at Holdenby. Kneeling before his master, Herbert was ‘enjoined to secrecy’ and told to take down a message to Parliament, which Charles proceeded to dictate.
The result was clearly satisfactory, for it was not long after, according to Herbert’s own account, that both he and Harrington were admitted as trusted members of the king’s intimate circle. Indeed, only a week or so after his initial meeting with the pair, Charles told the parliamentary commissioners:
that he had taken notice of Mr Harrington and Mr Thomas Herbert, and being well satisfied with the report he had concerning them, as to their sobriety and good Education, he was willing to receive them as Grooms into his Bedchamber to wait upon his person along with Mr Maxwell and Mr Mawl, which the Commissioners approving, they were that night admitted and by his Majesty instructed as to the Duty and Service he expected from them.
James Harrington too, then, it seems, was to enjoy a special relationship with Charles, which would last right up to the time around New Year 1649 when their association was abruptly terminated by Parliamentarians furious, it is said, over his refusal to swear to report anything he might hear of a royal escape attempt. At least two contemporary accounts speak of Harrington with Charles upon the scaffold; indeed, and like his colleague Herbert, he was a man of both substance and wide experience. Younger than Herbert by five years, he was born in 1611 in Upton, Northamptonshire, the eldest son of Sir Sapcotes Harrington of Rand in Lincolnshire, and a great-nephew of the first Lord Harrington of Exton, though the early years of his manhood were marked by a restlessness not altogether typical of his class. At the age of 18, he entered Trinity College, Oxford, as a gentleman commoner, though he left two years later with no degree, and subsequently departed the Middle Temple even more abruptly, developing an animus towards lawyers, which found ample expression in his book, The Commonwealth of Oceana, published in 1656. In between times, prior to his entry into the royal household, he had enlisted in a Dutch militia regiment – apparently seeing no service – before touring the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, France, Switzerland and Italy. In the summer of 1635, it seems, he was in Geneva, and subsequently completed his travels in Rome, where, we are told, he ‘refused to kiss the Pope’s foot’.
Yet his return to England was chiefly unremarkable, for although he came to Parliament’s financial assistance during 1641 and 1642, and again in 1645, he appears simply to have settled for anonymity at Rand, living the life of an ‘unmarried country gentleman of studious tastes’. Why, indeed, Harrington was eventually appointed to the royal household remains something of a mystery, although his well-known republican views are certain to have convinced many of his reliability, and he had already obtained experience as a servant to Prince Charles Louis, son of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, the king’s eldest sister. Herbert describes him, in fact, as ‘a Gentleman well accomplished’ who ‘had waited upon the Prince Elector Palatine in his Chamber, had travelled, Germany, Italy and France, and spake their languages’. Other contemporary accounts confirmed the king’s fondness for Harrington, notwithstanding his political views. According to Anthony Wood, for instance, ‘His Majesty loved his company’ and found him not only ‘an ingenious man’ but ‘chose rather to converse with him than with others of his chamber’. Though ‘when they happened to talk of a Commonwealth, the King seemed not able to endure it’, Wood makes no suggestion of any resulting hostility, for ‘they had often discourses concerning government’ and were otherwise apparently of a like mind on all matters.
Even so, it was Herbert who continued to exercise a special influence, displaying both loyalty to the MPs that had appointed him and a personal devotion to the king that made betrayal unthinkable. In recent times, it is true, there has been some variation of opinion upon the selflessness of Herbert’s service to his master. In 1678, for example, he published Threnodia Carolina, an account of the last two years of the king’s life, which has now become a standard source, where Herbert himself appears a model of dedication, being too distraught to be with the king on the scaffold and, on another occasion, bursting into tears when the king seemed upset by some news he had brought. But Threnodia Carolina may, some say, have been produced for ulterior motives – an attempt, on the one hand, to give Herbert a good name with Charles II, who did indeed award him a baronetcy, and a ploy to clear the name of his regicide son-in-law Robert Phayre. Nor, of course, would Herbert have been the first to massage his account out of self-interest. Yet many of those appointed to the king’s service by Parliament, and many a stauncher Roundhead than he, were converted into Royalists upon closer acquaintance with Charles the man. Herbert himself, to his credit, never professed to any such conversion, preferring instead to maintain a benevolent neutrality, neither aiding nor exposing the king’s escape attempts, though delivering more in the process, it must be said, by his prudence and moderation than many of his master’s more hot-blooded supporters.
During his stay at Holdenby, in any case, the king appears to have given up all thoughts of escape, though this by no means prevented the efforts of his friends to maintain a secret correspondence with him. Letters, it seems, were brought in by various means, sometimes by ladies who came to kiss the king’s hand, or in other cases by those who still came to Holdenby to be touched for the ‘Evil’. Among its many other side effects, the war had deprived Charles’ subjects of the opportunity to seek the traditional cure from their sovereign, and he was especially gratified by their continued belief in his healing powers. Since the stream of sufferers to Holdenby was surprisingly steady, moreover, so too, it seems, were the opportunities for Royalist interlopers. There were other more systematic attempts, it seems, to keep the king abreast of the wider world’s affairs. For during Charles’ stay at Holdenby, he was visited by the Countess of Lanark, on her way from Edinburgh to France, who offered ‘to do anything in [the king’s] service’, so that he could maintain contact with his wife.
Communicating with the French ambassador whenever ‘passing through London’, the countess was already, it seems, part of a courier network in southern England that had been enjoying significant success for some time. For on only two occasions do we hear of letters being intercepted by the king’s captors. On 9 April, for instance, Major Humphrey Bosvile, a former officer in the Royalist army, assumed the disguise of a ‘rustic’ angler, and intercepted the king while he was dismounting by a bridge at Harrowden on his way to Boughton to play bowls. Slipping a packet of letters from the queen into Charles’ hands, Bosvile was able to retreat some distance before being exposed by a local miller who had been more vigilant than the surrounding guards and subsequently refused to accept a bribe to remain silent. When apprehended and questioned, Bosvile duly admitted that he had brought letters from the queen, while claiming to know nothing of the contents, except that he had heard from Lady Culpepper that they contained a request from Prince Charles that he be allowed to serve in Flanders under the Duke of Orléans. However, with the kind of neck-or-nothing panache that typified many Cavaliers of his kind, Bosvile could not resist an opportunity for the last word. For when, according to the news-sheet Moderate Intelligencer, ‘it was demanded of him how he dared to do such a thing as deliver letters to his Majesty, he answered that if he could not have done it in the way he did, he would have done it openly before them all’, even if it were to mean ‘he had dyed for it’.
Nor would the king himself divulge the letters’ contents to the parliamentary commissioners at Holdenby. On 4 March, Nicholas Oudart had observed from Holland that ‘the king is so narrowly watched that nobody can privately speak with him nor present to, nor receive from him anything but what his overseers admit’. Yet if Charles found himself increasingly hemmed in, he was king nevertheless and even his ‘overseers’ seem to have recognised, up to a point, the moral limitations resulting from this. For when pressed for details about his wife’s correspondence, Charles told his interrogators emphatically how ‘he was not to give account to any man living’, and the issue was pursued no further. Plainly, in the situation pertaining, it was not always clear which party was ascendant. The same kind of ambivalence, resulting from Parliament’s reluctance to press home its advantage with the kind of vigour that might be expected, manifested itself in other ways, too, as the prisoner continued to defy, and his supporters continued to offend, with remarkable impunity. Bosvile, indeed, was sent to London to account for his actions and committed by Parliament to Newgate Prison for his troubles, only to reappear at various intervals, making regular escapes from imprisonment in the process, to carry dispatches to France and Holland.
Even more intriguing, however, were the activities and treatment of a certain ‘wondrous bold’ and ‘handsome’ lady who was seized and searched at Holdenby a few weeks after Bosvile’s exposure. According to an account written at the time by a minor courtier named Roger Corbet, a woman ‘calling herself Lady Cave, a gentleman’s daughter about Stamford’ had received a letter brought from France by a gentleman or his servant, and subsequently approached ‘another gentlewoman in these parts’, whose name was never revealed, to assist her in delivering it to the king. The letter, it seems, had been written by Jack Ashburnham and delivered by John Browne, a barber of St Ives who had risen to become Ashburnham’s right-hand man, while the ‘Lady Cave’ mentioned by Corbet appears to have been Mary Cave, daughter of William Cave, deputy lieutenant of Northamptonshire, with whom the king had stayed overnight during his flight from Oxford to Newark the previous year. If so, the deputy lieutenant’s daughter was an obvious choice for the task. Of sufficient rank to be allowed access to the king and of sufficient loyalty to be entrusted with the task, she was also a member of a family that, to all outward appearances at least, had served the Parliamentary cause without demur up to this point.
But why the services of a mysterious, unnamed third party were required is almost as intriguing as the identity of the other, unnamed, lady herself. It is certainly known that the legendary Jane Whorwood – sister of the Countess of Lanark and one of the most remarkable, unsung stalwarts of the Royalist cause during the king’s captivity – was in the vicinity of Northampton at this time, as she continued to shadow her royal master and serve his interests at every opportunity. This time, it seems, she was at the home of Sir Robert Banastre, former master of the household to James I, and she too was an obvious candidate for the task of conveying Ashburnham’s letter. With a view to assisting the escape of Henrietta Maria and Prince Charles to France, she had already arranged in 1644 for some 775kg of gold bullion to be smuggled into Oxford in barrels of soap, and it was not without good reason that she would later be hailed by her contemporary Anthony Wood as ‘the most loyal person to King Charles in his miseries as any woman in England’. Equally crucially, she was also the stepdaughter of James Maxwell, one of the bedchamber grooms that Charles had been allowed to retain, and would therefore have enjoyed ample opportunity to gain access to the king’s apartments at Holdenby.
In any event, it was the unnamed woman enlisted by Lady Cave who eventually proceeded to a house where an officer of the king’s Parliamentary escort named Captain Abbott had his lodgings. Staying there for several nights, she appears to have managed, with the landlady’s help, to enlist Abbott’s assistance in gaining permission for Lady Cave to kiss the king’s hand, as intended, though it was at this point that problems arose. For the landlady, who had been trusted with the secret of the letter, informed her husband, and although he was a Royalist and therefore ‘favourable to the design’ in principle, he decided that he dared not run the risk of detection. Informed by the husband of what was transpiring, Abbott, who was described for good reason as a ‘very honest faithful gentleman’, duly informed the parliamentary commissioners at Holdenby, with the result that the scheme was allowed to run its course until the offenders could be caught red-handed.
Accordingly, when Mary Cave arrived at Holdenby on 11 May, she was duly arrested, taken into a room and searched, but managed in the process to slip the offending letter behind a tapestry, so that nothing was found upon her. Left to return home, it was not until two days later, in fact, that Cave was again apprehended after the hidden letter was eventually discovered. Ostensibly a petition referring to some goods lost at sea, it contained on the back, probably written in lemon juice, a ciphered message, in which Ashburnham promised a ‘good war for your recovery’, involving Dutch and Irish forces led by the heir to the throne. In view of this, the message continued, the king should give no ground to Parliament. There was advice, too, from ‘389’ – the code number for the queen; ‘389,’ the message ran, ‘hopes you have burned all your letters and ciphers. If you have not, for God’s sake do it. You will still remember the alphabet.’
Though far from unexpected, the message was nevertheless incendiary stuff and more than adequate grounds, if Parliament had chosen to press its case, for Mary Cave and her associates to have been pursued with full rigour. But her claims, under interrogation, that she had not known the contents of the letter were accepted with what can only be described as remarkable blitheness. Indeed, after a brief period of custody by the Mayor of Northampton, during which time Parliament agents arrived to question her, she appears to have been released without punishment. Even John Browne, whom she implicated in her testimony, was also, it seems, spared any formal legal proceedings – presumably on the grounds that he had been acting under directions from his master. In the aftermath of the whole episode, the only action seems to have been a minor pruning of suspect servants from the royal household. By that time, of course, the unnamed female accomplice who had facilitated the whole episode was long vanished.
Thereafter, it appears to have been the king’s own servants, including Jane Whorwood’s stepfather himself, who assumed the most prominent role in maintaining the steady flow of royal correspondence. Appointed Black Rod in 1622, and acting, after the dissolution of Parliament in 1629, as pawnbroker and financier to the king on the security of the royal jewels, James Maxwell had previously served as Groom of the Bedchamber to both Charles, before he became king, and his elder brother Prince Henry. But he was also known for his entrepreneurial success through his experiments in the manufacture of iron at the mines he owned in the Peak District, and for the exploitation of the patent for the manufacture of pipe clay which Charles had granted him in 1638. With strong connections to the City of London, he had been able to work closely with sympathetic merchants to raise funds for the Royalist cause, and he would not hesitate now, along with Harry Firebrace, to provide whatever further assistance he might on the king’s behalf.
Ironically, however, two of the most dedicated smugglers of illicit correspondence proved to be men installed in the royal household by Parliament itself. Francis Cresset, the Steward and Treasurer, was a gentleman of an old family in Shropshire, who had first entered service for the Bishop of Durham and later became attached to the Earl of Pembroke. After the death of his father and brother, who were both killed while fighting on the Royalist side, however, he was nevertheless able to become an agent in conveying letters to and from the king by remaining attached to Pembroke on the advice of another Royalist agent, the Reverend John Barwick, D.D. In this way he not only escaped suspicion, but was able to obtain, through his master, parliamentary passports for pedlars and others who were carrying secret correspondence. Considered by Pembroke a man in whom complete trust could be placed, Cresset’s defection would prove invaluable. Indeed, Cresset, who was accorded his own code letter ‘A’ in the flow of ciphered messages, would be one of those specially singled out by the king for his ‘harty and industrious endeavours in this my service’.
Another whom Charles would ‘alwais remember’ was Abraham Dowcett, or Doucet, a Frenchman by birth, who seems to have originated from Rouen, where his uncle was governor. Always referred to as ‘F’ in the king’s ciphered messages, Dowcett was in fact a Protestant who had been in the king’s service as early as 1629, when he served abroad under the Earl of Holland. But though he subsequently became a Page of the Bedchamber, he presumably took the side of Parliament in some capacity during the Civil War, in order to be appointed in the first place to his new role as Clerk of the Kitchen in the imprisoned king’s household. He appears to have lost no time in reverting to his former allegiance when placed in close association with the king. For in a petition to Charles II after the Restoration, he claimed, ‘at the hazard of his life’, to have served his royal master by supplying him ‘with pen and ink when the Commissioners debarred him of them’ and conveying ‘letters between him and the Queen and other secret intelligence’.
That the king should indeed have been deprived of writing materials at Holdenby seems almost surprising, perhaps, in view of the respect and freedom he was clearly accorded in other respects. But some confirmation of Dowcett’s own role is provided in a letter written by Nicholas Oudart to Sir Edward on 18 February 1647. ‘They permit him not to speak privately or write to anybody save when themselves are by to heare and see’, observed Oudart, though the king, he continued, ‘suffers none of the Commissioners to lodge in his bedchamber, but puts out the candle and bolts the door himself’. It was then, it seems, at dead of night and free from observation, that Charles composed his letters, loyally assisted by Dowcett, who was already smuggling ink and paper into the royal bedchamber.
The games of bowls and chess, the brisk garden walks, the leisurely stints of private reading and the company of respectful, and in some cases loyal, servants did not, however, belie the deeper reality of the king’s predicament. After seven months of being harangued by Presbyterian ministers, nagged by his wife, berated by her advisers, rejected by both Parliament and the army, and thwarted in escape, the outward calm of the king’s days at Holdenby might well have seemed blissful by comparison. But his captors’ refusal to grant him his own chaplains, or to make any concessions regarding religion in return for his own on practically every other subject had left him particularly upset and dejected. On 17 February, he wrote to the Speaker of the House of Commons explaining why ‘it is fit for me to be attended by some of my chaplains whose opinions as clergymen I esteem and reverence’. Their presence was necessary, he claimed, ‘not merely for the exercise of my conscience, but also ever for clearing my judgement concerning the present differences in religion’. Yet a letter making the same request, seventeen days later, asking Parliament to consider ‘the divers reasons which no Christian can be ignorant of’, fell on equally deaf ears.
Less than three weeks after arriving at Holdenby, in fact, Charles had complained to the French ambassador that ‘never was a prisoner more strictly guarded than I am’. ‘I must tell you,’ he continued, ‘I see nothing but ruin to my person through the behaviour of their commissioners.’ Even though he went on to declare that he was ‘resolved the rather to perish than … act against my conscience’, there were telltale signs that even his hitherto adamantine will might be about to falter. In Paris too, for that matter, Henrietta Maria appeared at last to have given up all thought of her own future in England, and her mental distress during those early months appears to have been more acute than ever. Giovanni Nani, reporting from the Venetian embassy in the French capital, observed how ‘the Queen of England with bitter tears has lamented to the Regent the condition of herself and her husband, and that the long delayed hopes which have been held out of peace have reduced them to the utmost extremity, in which they are languishing at present’.
Nor had Henrietta’s renewed efforts to broker a fresh treaty between the Marquis of Ormonde and the Irish rebels provided any consolation. A year earlier, the marquis had succeeded in patching together an interim agreement, but since it contained no commitments concerning religion, the papal nuncio, Rinuccini, supported by the clergy, had persuaded the rebels to repudiate it. For his part, the nuncio still cherished dreams of forging a united, independent and Catholic Ireland under the personal protection of the Pope – a prospect which the embattled Ormonde, responsible for the lives and property of the Protestant settlers across the Irish Sea, could never countenance. Instead, he dealt in realities, which encompassed the king’s personal circumstances as much as Ireland’s. With the Royalist cause apparently lost and a Catholic triumph in Ireland seemingly imminent, Ormonde was therefore already contemplating the unthinkable: the surrender of Dublin into Parliament’s hands, which would finally occur in June.
Bereft and beleaguered, with all other options exhausted, even Charles, therefore, was nearing the point where some form of compromise might prove inescapable if a suitable window of opportunity were to arise – which duly happened on 12 May when an approach by a group of Presbyterian peers was made through Bellièvre, the French ambassador. For concern at the growing stridency of Independents, in both Parliament and the army especially, was now increasingly forcing the pace of events. The Scottish presence in northern England at the invitation of their Presbyterian ‘allies’ at Westminster, had served, in fact, to boost support for the Independents, but the recent withdrawal shifted the balance once more in favour of their Presbyterian opponents, who favoured the king’s speedy restoration on terms of their choosing. In London especially, militant Presbyterianism among the clergy and leading citizens was becoming combined with increasing calls for peace and a return to stability, but in the provinces, too, hostility to high taxation and the presence of the New Model Army was leading to similar calls for restoration of the king on specific conditions. No less importantly, fears of the king’s possible dethronement were also leading to a resurgence of Royalist sympathies in Scotland, where since March, the Duke of Hamilton and his allies had been controlling the Scottish commission negotiating at Westminster.
At this critical juncture, then, the king was being offered the possibility of rescuing a semblance of respectability from a lost cause, and on this occasion, weakened by the unremitting anxieties of recent months, he responded accordingly. Retreating significantly on the issue that had consistently dominated his thinking, he now agreed to ‘confirm the Presbyterian government’ of the Church for three years – so long as ‘His Majesty and his household be not hindered from using that form of God’s service which they have previously’ – and to ‘consent by Act of Parliament, that the whole power of the militia, both by sea and land, for the space of ten years, be in such persons as the two Houses of Parliament shall nominate’. No less extraordinary was the declaration, amid Charles’ pleas ‘presently to be admitted to his Parliament at Westminster’, that he was now prepared to ‘dispatch his directions to the Prince his son, to return immediately to him’ and ‘undertake for his ready obedience thereunto’. On other matters such as the Covenant, he was, it is true, considerably more vague, though even here he was careful not to close the door on discussion, so that on 18 May, when his answer was announced at Westminster, both the English Presbyterians and Scots commissioners considered his overall response the basis for an accommodation. Indeed, only two days later, the Lords responded to his persistent pleas to come to London to negotiate directly, by inviting him to come for talk to his palace at Oatlands, only just outside the capital.
But in spite of Charles’ hopes that the two Houses of Parliament – ‘as they are Englishmen and lovers of peace, by the duty they owe to His Majesty their king, and by the bowels of compassion they have to their fellow-subjects’ – might look favourably upon his offer and thereby assure that ‘the joyful news of peace may be restored to this languishing kingdom’, he had acted too late. Since the establishment of Presbyterianism by MPs in January 1645 and the consequent suppression of nonconformity, the cleavage between Presbyterians and Independents had become increasingly a clash between Parliament and the army, where sectarianism among the common soldiery and certain officers was rife. This was by no means the only cause of tension, for as Parliament’s financial difficulties grew, so too did arrears in army pay, which by March 1647 appear to have stood at some £2.5 million. The infantry had received no wages for four-and-a-half months, while arrears for the Horse and Dragoons stood at no less than forty-three weeks. To complete the soldiers’ tale of frustration, Parliament was now proposing not only to disband part of the army, but to send the remainder to Ireland.
Under such direct provocation, firebrands like the ubiquitous John Lilburne – who, besides forming a ‘Leveller’ party among civilians, was now actively involved in forming one among the troops of the New Model Army – found a ready audience. Indeed, so successful were Lilburne and his friends that by April, soldiers were electing ‘agitators’ to present their case and establishing a Council of the Army to direct their affairs. When, moreover, Sir Thomas Fairfax announced on 31 May that he would not draw up his regiments for disbandment, the rift between Parliament and the army became in effect outright, and Lilburne seized the opportunity to set his own inimitable seal upon matters. On the very same day, in fact, though imprisoned in the Tower, he managed to publish his Rash Oaths Unwarrantable, in which he castigated MPs as dastardly renegades and suggested that the king’s ‘seventeen years misgovernment … was but a flea-biting or as a molehill to a mountain, in comparison of what this everlasting Parliament already is’.
For Oliver Cromwell and other members of the army’s High Command, meanwhile, the position was delicate in the extreme. The general had already begged Parliament on various occasions to consider freedom of conscience, and was reluctant on principle to see the soldiers who had won the war subsequently deprived of their wages. Though he had no wish to meddle in politics, he also remained intensely reluctant to see the army’s victory thrown away by cynical Parliament men, anxious to strike deals with the king. The prospect of counter-revolution engineered by Presbyterian MPs like Denzil Holles and other ‘such incendiaries’ was, after all, increasingly conceivable, and remained no less tolerable for a New Model Army, infected with Leveller zeal for free-thinking and equality, than the renewed spectre of invasion by Scottish Covenanters. As one pamphlet put it – echoing Holles’ own disdain for servants riding horses – officers formerly ‘cloathed in raggs are now arrayed in Scarlet’ while men ‘used so long to Command … have forgotten [how] to obey’. But while Presbyterian lords and Parliamentarians bemoaned an upturned natural order, for common soldiers and their hard-pressed commanders, struggling as they were to maintain discipline, the point of no return had already come and gone.
It was in the early afternoon of 2 June, therefore, whilst enjoying a leisurely game of bowls at Althorp in the company of two parliamentary commissioners, that the king first learned of a cavalry detachment approaching Holdenby. Realising what this was likely to mean, he returned at once to discuss the threat with Major-General Browne and Colonel Graves, and all agreed to stand their ground. Browne called his men together to explain the situation, and doubled the guard, though it was not until midnight that the intruders – a force of 500 battle-hardened troopers – finally reached Holdenby and mounted guards at all the entrances. By any standards they were a menacing presence, all volunteers from different units and commanded not by a colonel as was customary for a cavalry regiment, but by a cornet or ensign, the most junior commissioned rank. Cornet George Joyce, a member of Colonel Whalley’s regiment, had indeed been a humble tailor’s apprentice before serving with distinction under Cromwell and receiving a commission by Sir Thomas Fairfax, who would go on to describe him as ‘an Arch-Agitator’. Though, as the most junior officer in Fairfax’s own lifeguard, his initial announcement that he had business with the king evoked laughter from Browne and Graves, who greeted him at Holdenby, the mirth was short-lived. For, when asked upon whose authority he requested access to Charles, Joyce’s response was steely. His own, he replied. After which, the extent of that authority was swiftly demonstrated when the parliamentary commissioners present at Holdenby were at once placed under guard, as the garrison fraternised openly with Joyce’s men.
With Browne and Graves decisively undermined, moreover, and plainly smiling no longer, the cornet then proceeded directly to the king’s quarters – with all the calm resolve that might be expected from any young man of conviction who had experienced the sharp end of a bloody war against privilege and hidebound tradition. When asked by Charles’ attendants who it was that ‘in such uncivil manner and so unseasonable a time came to disquiet the king’s rest’, Joyce’s answer through the locked door that confronted him was once again resolute. Displaying what Sir Thomas Herbert, who was present at the scene, described as ‘strange confidence’ and ‘having a cocked pistol in his hand’, he made it clear that, while regrettable, the inconvenience could not be helped, ‘for speak with him [the king] he would, and that presently’. Though further demands were necessary, as Joyce ‘refused to part with either sword or pistol’ and ‘pressed for entrance’, the declarations of Maxwell, Mawl, Harrington and Herbert, the king’s attendants, that they ‘were resolved to sacrifice their lives’ proved unavailing. For the noise, it seems, awoke the king himself, who then summoned Maxwell by the little silver bell he always kept by his bed, and thereafter – ‘being acquainted with the business and uncivil carriage of the Cornet’ – sent word that ‘he would not rise nor speak with him until morning’. Only the king’s personal intervention, therefore, temporarily thwarted Joyce. At which point, we hear, the officer ‘huffed’ and, ‘seeing his design could not be effected in the night’, duly waited upon the morrow.
When morning came, however, even the regal scorn of which Charles was amply capable could not delay the inevitable. For after the king had risen ‘a little sooner than ordinary’ and ‘performed his morning exercise’, he sent for Joyce, who arrived before him ‘with no less confidence than if he had been a supreme officer’ and ‘acquainted him with the commands he had concerning his removal’. The commissioners, who had been apprehended by Joyce’s men, were Charles’ initial concern, and the officer duly explained to the king’s satisfaction that they were ‘to return back unto the Parliament’. But when Charles then asked Joyce for ‘a sight of your instructions’ to establish the authority under which he was acting, the response could not have been more emphatic. Taking the king to a nearby window, Joyce duly showed him his troop of horse drawn up in the inner court and ready for action. ‘These sir,’ he declared, ‘are my instructions’ – leaving Charles with no other option beyond a graceful retort acknowledging the checkmate that had befallen him so suddenly. Looking long and hard at the soldiers before him – ‘and finding them proper men and well mounted and well armed’ – the king told Joyce, ‘smilingly’, that ‘his instructions were in fair characters, legible without spelling’.
Reduced at this stage to little more than a counter in the broader power game being played out between Parliament and the army, Charles retained, then, not only his decorum but that keen sense of his own majesty that would never leave him. According to one account, for instance, even Joyce’s flint-faced disregard for convention was not entirely proof against the king’s unbending faith in his divinely ordained rank. ‘But if I should refuse yet to go with you,’ he is said to have asked the officer, ‘I hope you will not force me? I am your King and you ought not to lay violent hands upon your King, for I acknowledge none here to be above me but God.’ At which, Joyce appears to have lapsed, momentarily at least, into the kind of deference that he had so far shunned so successfully. ‘Our desires,’ he declared, ‘are not to force Your Majesty but humbly entreat Your Majesty to go with us.’ Nor was this all. For Charles was also prepared, it seems, to quibble about his destination. ‘Now Gentlemen, for the place you intend to have me?’ he asked next. When told it was Oxford, he coolly demurred by pointing out that there was ‘no good air’ in the town. Likewise, when Cambridge was offered as an alternative, Charles appears to have been dismissive, suggesting Newmarket instead, which Joyce duly accepted.
Indeed, the king seems to have mounted his horse only after the threat of force against the parliamentary commissioners who were objecting to his removal had been retracted, and even then insisted successfully that they be allowed to travel with him. Already, it seems, the commissioners had dispatched Captain Titus, the king’s equerry – ‘by an express’ – to acquaint Parliament with developments, and Titus had arrived the very next day, killing his horse in the process, it seems, since the sum of £50 was subsequently voted for him to buy another. In the meantime, the commissioners remained adamant that the king should not be abandoned entirely to the army’s control. On the contrary, ‘seeing reason was of no force to dissuade, nor menaces to affright’, the Earls of Pembroke and Denbigh, as well as Lord Montague, were now determined ‘to attend the King at all adventures’. If the commissioners remained undeterred by the ‘violence’ of the army’s action, their determination was only reinforced by the king’s own coolness at the unexpected turn of events. For not only did he insist upon retaining his servants, in order to ‘be properly provided for like a man in his place’, he appears to have left Holdenby ‘merriest of the company’ and found opportunity into the bargain for one more parting thrust at his captors. He was to travel that day, Joyce had told him, ‘as far as Your Majesty can ride’, whereupon the prisoner had declared imperiously that he was fully capable of riding ‘as far as you or anyone else’.
Yet, for all his defiance, when the king left the long gravel drive and elegant Doric arcades of Holdenby behind him, it would be for the last time. The cost of building the place had bankrupted Elizabeth I’s Lord Chancellor, Sir Christopher Hatton, and it was there, eleven years earlier, that Henrietta Maria had pinned a picture of St Catherine to her bed-curtains upon a visit with her husband. Passing in turn from his father to his mother to his elder brother and then to him, Holdenby retained therefore a special significance for the man now leaving it under heavily armed escort, though ‘this very stately house’, as events would soon prove, was ‘languishing’ like Charles himself under imminent threat. For ‘about two years after’, Sir Thomas Herbert informs us, ‘that beautiful and famous structure was, amongst other his Majesty’s royal houses pulled down, by order of the two Houses of Parliament, to satisfy the soldiers arrears’. Whereby, adds Herbert, ‘the splendour of the kingdom was not a little eclipsed, as by their ruins is now sadly manifested’.
The reason for the king’s removal, of course, was not in doubt, and least of all to Charles himself. Indeed, the gaping rift between Parliament and the army may well explain his continued high spirits upon departure. But responsibility for the king’s seizure is altogether harder to ascertain. For some weeks, in fact, the idea of arresting him had been circulating around the radical Leveller regiments, and it was a notion with which Joyce fully agreed, having stated his readiness only a little earlier ‘to do things as were never yet done on earth’. Moreover, he seems to have been acting under instructions from some central committee of the agitators’ organisation after learning at Oxford, while engaged with the men of Colonel Rainsborough’s foot regiment in securing an artillery train, that orders were being issued from Westminster to remove the king from Holdenby. Rightly fearing, as many in the army were beginning to do, that Charles was to be brought nearer to London so that Presbyterians could strike a deal with him, Joyce appears to have resolved on his own initiative to pre-empt matters.
But it was a heavy responsibility for such a junior officer to assume, and for this reason, it appears, Joyce left his men on 31 May to seek the approval of none other than Oliver Cromwell. That very evening, moreover, Cromwell’s approval was indeed obtained, though with the specific proviso that the officer would be disowned if his mission failed. Not altogether surprisingly, of course, it would later be claimed that Cromwell had engineered the whole escapade from the very outset, with Joyce no more than a willing executioner of the general’s scheme. The king himself certainly seemed unconvinced when Cromwell told him in person, just two weeks after the abduction, that Joyce had acted wholly upon his own initiative. ‘Unless you hang up Joyce,’ the king laughed, ‘I will not believe what you say!’ And there was no denying either that Cromwell was responsible for the pension of £100 with which Joyce was subsequently provided. But Cromwell’s respect for the authority of Fairfax, his commander-in-chief, was unimpeachable, and it seems inconceivable that he would have undermined their trust and friendship by acting without consultation. Fairfax’s shock and consternation upon hearing that the king was on his way to Newmarket is, moreover, beyond doubt, as he threatened to court-martial Joyce before eventually relenting and promising him the captaincy of the first troop to become vacant.
In any event, the cornet’s promotion was well-earned and his pension worth every penny, for his initiative had greatly strengthened the hand of the army radicals, with whom Cromwell had now thrown in his lot. On 10 June, following an army rendezvous on Triploe Heath, twelve senior officers, including General Fairfax, Cromwell and Sir Hardress Waller, and the more radical colonels Pride and Rainsborough, now sent a letter, not to Parliament, but to that other centre of counter-revolutionary activity, the City of London. The letter voiced the army’s demand for satisfaction against the guilty men who had misrepresented its aims and tried to disband it. But there was now a call, too, for ‘a settlement of the Peace of the Kingdom and of the Liberties of the Subject … which … we … have as much right to demand … as we have to our money, or the other common interests of Souldiers’. On 15 June, this headlong process of politicisation was stepped up by the so-called ‘Representation or Declaration of the Army’, which had been prepared by the army’s newly created General Council. Leading Presbyterian MPs, including the hated Denzil Holles, were to be purged, Parliament was to be dissolved as a prelude to new elections, and while the declaration steered clear of specific recommendations about the franchise, there was nevertheless a recommendation for the redistribution of seats at the expense of a number of scandalously rotten boroughs. For good measure, there was to be generous allowance for religious toleration, along with the proposal that ‘such who, upon Conscientious grounds, may differ from the established forms may not be debarred from the common Rights … belonging equally to all’.
Common soldiers and their officers were now no longer perceiving themselves as ‘a mere mercenary Army, hired to serve any arbitrary Power of State’, but as a force ‘called forth … by the several Declarations of Parliament to the Defence of our own and the Peoples just Rights and Liberties’. As the early summer of 1647 unfolded, so MPs fell under heavy bombardment, too, from a stream of Leveller petitions, some of which – as the vote on a proposal that they should be burnt by the common hangman confirms – were attracting support from Independent allies of the army leaders within the House itself. Those leaders, of course, were only too anxious to check the process whereby the Levellers were forging a power base of frightening proportions within the army. But they were no less anxious to outface the Presbyterian ‘establishment’ which threatened to betray all they had fought so tirelessly to achieve. For they had just acquired the trump card at a time when the cards that remained unplayed daily became fewer as the stakes increased.
‘They must either sink us or we sink them’, declared one protagonist in the impending fight-to-the-finish over how, and by whom, the realm should be ruled. Nor had the alternatives ever been so dramatically displayed as on the lawn outside Holdenby House when Charles I made ready to leave. All around were Cornet Joyce’s troopers – ‘as good a law as now I can see executed by any judge in England’, thought John Lilburne – and in their midst the man who had made soldiers of most of them in the first place, still unbowed by their presence and still insisting, as he would to the very end, ‘I am your king’.