5
‘I am at much more freedom than I were, for my friends have free access to me, my chaplains wait upon me according to their vocation, and I have free intelligence with my wife and anybody else whom I please.’
Charles I to the Duke of Hamilton, 12 July 1647
The royal coach made steady progress from Holdenby, it seems, for by the night of 3 June, the prisoner within and his army escort had reached Hinchingbrooke in Huntingtonshire, ‘a fair mansion house’ belonging to Colonel Edward Montague, who would be created Earl of Sandwich in the following reign. Throughout the journey to the former nunnery, Charles had ridden in the company of the same parliamentary commissioners who had been ready, if ‘in a capacity’, to resist his new captors ‘to the loss of their lives’. But though they were ‘saddened’ and ‘exceedingly troubled’ at their failure in the face of overwhelming odds, the king himself remained buoyant during his short stay, receiving ‘honour and heart welcome’ before moving next morning to Childerley, about 4 miles from Cambridge, where he was entertained with great hospitality by Lady Anne Cutts, widow of Sir John, the former MP for Cambridgeshire who had died the previous year. On the way, the king’s escort had been met, at Fairfax’s behest, by two regiments of horse under Colonel Whalley, but Charles himself had refused Whalley’s suggestion that he return to Holdenby, with the result that the recently bereaved Lady Anne and the small rural community over which she presided found themselves the unexpected hosts of a royal visitor and an imposing force of Roundhead cavalry.
Over three days at Childerley, Charles was once again restored to full celebrity, as masters, fellows, graduates and scholars flocked from Cambridge to kiss his hand and hail him with cries of ‘Vivat Rex’. More significantly, he was visited, too, by nearly as large a crowd of senior army officers, including Fairfax, Cromwell, Ireton and Whalley, who came not merely to inspect their ‘guest’, but, rather more remarkably perhaps, to accord him due honour and deference. According to Sir Thomas Herbert, indeed, the king was ‘highly caressed by all the great officers, who seldom failed to wait and discourse with him as opportunity offered’. All, it appears, ‘behaved themselves with civility and due respect to his royal person’, while Charles in turn was ‘sometimes very pleasant in his discourse with them’. Fairfax, in particular, was keen to emphasise that the seizure at Holdenby had been carried out ‘without his order or approbation’, and Joyce was duly replaced with a more senior – and rather more amenable – officer as the king’s main overseer. Several officers, it seems, were perfectly prepared, ‘so soon as they came into the presence’, to kiss the king’s hands, and even Charles’ attendants seem to have been tendered the respect to which they were entitled. For, as Herbert relates, even the ‘private soldiers’ were willing ‘to oblige all that followed the king with civility’.
Nor should it be forgotten that the military visitors to Childerley included among their number those that can hardly be characterised as anything other than hard-line radicals. Hugh Peter, for instance, was perhaps the epitome of those razor-tongued army preachers who had earned notoriety by their swingeing attacks upon both king and Parliament at this time. Born in Cornwall in 1598, Peter had become a leading Puritan divine before finding it expedient to retire first to Holland in 1629 and then to New England six years later in the company of John Winthrop, the wealthy Puritan lawyer who had helped found the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and to whom he was related by marriage. Whilst overseas with Winthrop, moreover, he had taken a leading part in New England’s affairs, only to return a year before the war and subsequently enlist with the Parliamentary forces as a chaplain, acting ultimately as Cromwell’s chief propagandist, and gaining special recognition for his inspirational addresses to the troops before battle. Indeed, his sermons against Charles I would lead ultimately to his own execution as a regicide, although he is also believed to have assisted at the king’s eventual execution. Charismatic and passionate to an extreme, though loathed for his outspokenness by most who met him, Peter appears to have remained a rule unto himself until he crumbled during his own execution at Charing Cross on 16 October 1660, unable to endure the emasculation and disembowelment that awaited him.
‘Never,’ declared the official newspaper, Mercurius Publicus, ‘was person suffered death so unpitied and (which is more) whose execution was the delight of the people.’ Yet even Peter would bridle his restless tongue in the king’s presence at Childerley in the summer of 1647, as Charles was meticulously spared the kind of browbeating that had accompanied his captivity among the Scots at Newcastle. The two-week stay at his hunting lodge at Newmarket, which followed, proved equally congenial. The lodge itself had been fitted for his reception ‘as well as that little edifice would admit’, and most important of all he was now allowed his precious Anglican chaplains, the Reverend Doctors Hammond, Sheldon and Holdsworth. Many of the local gentry from Cambridgeshire, as well as those from farther afield in Suffolk and Essex, also flocked to see him in his Presence Chamber, where he seldom failed to dine in public. Most important of all, perhaps, he was now able to resume the ordered routine that suited him so favourably. Basking once again in the prayers and acclaim of common folk who happened to encounter him on the excursions that he was frequently allowed to undertake, he was also given access to his old associates, the Duke of Richmond and Sir William Fleetwood, as well as those servants who had been dismissed from his household at Holdenby. On other occasions, when not on public display or involved in business, he kept his usual hours of private devotion and spent much time on Newmarket Heath ‘to recreate himself, sometimes in his coach, but most part riding’. It was a place, observed Herbert, that ‘for good air and pleasure, gives place to no other in this great island’ – a place ‘much frequented by former princes’. After the tensions of Newcastle, it could not have been more suitable for Charles’ present purposes, especially when it is remembered that his own father, King James, had taken ‘exceeding delight there in hunting, hawking and races, both horse and foot’.
Less welcome, of course, were the overtures arriving from the Scots, which were roundly rejected by the king, not least of all because his apparently infinite sources of optimism were once again beginning to stir. ‘This army speaks to me very fair,’ he confided to a friend at this time, ‘which makes me hope well.’ According to the account of Major Robert Huntington, indeed, it was at Childerley that Cromwell made ‘large professions’ and ‘first gave his Majesty hopes of restauration’, along with assurances ‘that he would be continually instrumental therein’. And the mood, it seems, was infectious, for if Herbert judged correctly, even the parliamentary commissioners who continued to wait upon the king appeared ‘very cheerful, having as ’twas presumed, fair hopes as well as promises, that some grandees of the army would be instrumental and … endeavour a happy understanding between him and his Parliament’. The broader, altogether more frightening ramifications of the massive soldiers’ meetings of 10 June, at which there had been threats to march on London, were somehow coolly overlooked, as of course were Cromwell’s private thoughts, as he conversed on amicable terms with the king in his makeshift Presence Chamber. For the general had, it seems, already decided to take control of an overwhelming grass-roots movement among his soldiers that he had little chance, or indeed inclination, to stem. The consequences, of course, were to be momentous, but both Charles and even his well-wishing parliamentary associates at Childerley continued to cast only positive glosses and high-flown hopes upon the ominous tide of current events.
For this reason, the army’s decision to move the king to Hampton Court appears to have raised his expectations even higher, for he was sure that the closer he came to London, the easier he would find it to play Parliament and the Scots commissioners at Westminster off against each other. When Charles reached ‘his own little house’ at Royston on 24 June, moreover, after lodging at various noblemen’s houses en route, events once more contrived to cheer him. For although the dwelling was ‘seldom used … capable but of few attendants, and meanly furnished’, the town itself made every effort to welcome not only the king but also his followers and servants, ‘which then were numerous’. The army’s care and courtesy also remained undiminished during the two-day stay, notwithstanding the indiscretion of a hapless colonel who clumsily disrupted a solemn ceremony during which an emblem of the Garter was being returned to the king by the envoy of a German prince upon the death of the prince’s father. Not even Charles’ scowls, it seems, could force the man’s withdrawal until the royal barber, Mr Babington, who enjoyed ‘a better understanding of good manners’, persuaded him to clear off. The colonel who had been ‘so malapert as to interpose’, had done so, according to Herbert, ‘to the end that he might be privy to the affair, and hear what the envoy had to communicate to the king’. But he had acted entirely upon on his own initiative and was subsequently rewarded for his efforts with a ‘sound reproof’ from none other than Sir Thomas Fairfax himself.
Still well satisfied with his treatment and high in optimism, Charles then moved to Hatfield in Hertfordshire and the ‘very noble house’, with its ‘vineyard, gardens and walks full of pleasure’, that had been built during the previous reign by his father’s chief minister, Robert Cecil. Here, too, the king was treated ‘with great civility and observance’, and the very next day after his arrival on 26 June, he was allowed to use the Anglican Prayer Book in public for the first time in over a year, though even this would not match the highlight of his journey that was still to come. For, after leaving Hatfield on 1 July and continuing to follow the movements of the army on their indirect route to London, he passed through Windsor and on to Sion House, where he stopped for dinner with the Earl of Northumberland and his nephew, the Elector Palatine. It was here, it appears, that Charles was at long last informed that permission had been granted for a meeting with his children, who had fallen into the army’s hands after the Royalist surrender and were now under the earl’s care. Accordingly, after reaching Lord Craven’s house at Caversham on the south bank of the Thames on 3 July, where Cromwell visited him several times, he was finally reunited with his children for two whole nights.
Riding hotfoot to Maidenhead to meet them, the king’s emotional rendezvous with the Duke of Gloucester and Princess Elizabeth occurred on 15 July at the Greyhound Inn. Both Fairfax and Cromwell were present, and the exchange between the army’s Commander-in-Chief and the 11-year-old princess, in particular, was touching enough to be reported four days later in the contemporary newsletter Moderate Intelligencer:
Letters from the Army tell of the greatest joy of his Majesty at the sight of his children (returned Saturday) and mention this, that immediately upon coming to him, the General came into the Presence, which occasioned some carriage in those that attended his Majesty, which was taken notice of by the Princess, who demanded who he was, and understanding it was the General, she went unto him, and with the greatest of civilities, thanked him for the great happiness she at this time enjoyed, the sight of her dear Father, effected by his alone industry and ingagement; for which as she should run no hazard, so it should ever by her be acknowledged; and if ever in her power requited. He returned humble thanks, saying that he had done therein but the least of those duties he was obliged to serve his Majesty and children in; and having kissed her Highness’ hand, both made their addresses to his Majesty.
More interesting still, however, was Cromwell’s subsequent reaction to the meeting. Both he and Fairfax had come from Windsor, where they had been preparing the ground for the army’s forthcoming peace proposals, and now Sir John Berkeley claimed to have met him leaving the scene of the king’s encounter with his children. A cousin of Sir Thomas Roe, who was himself a kinsman of Henry Jermyn, Berkeley was, in fact, a committed Royalist who had undertaken diplomatic missions for the king and given good service in the wars. He had been present, too, at the baptism of Princess Henrietta Anne in Exeter Cathedral and recently spent time with the queen and Jermyn in Paris. But he was known, nonetheless, for his honesty, and for this reason had just been allowed to return from France along with Colonel William Legge, to rejoin Charles’ service as a suitable intermediary between king and army. As such, he would prove a valuable witness to events, and his account of the general’s emotional response to the sight of the king with his children is far from implausible, not least of all because the softer side of Cromwell’s personality is well attested by other sources. Always an inwardly sensitive man, Cromwell is therefore said to have spoken to Berkeley with tears in his eyes, having just witnessed what he apparently described as ‘the tenderest sight that ever his eyes beheld, which was the interview between the King and his children’. Never, he added, was man so abused as the king, who was ‘the most uprightest and most conscientious man of three Kingdoms’.
And if appearances were any guide, the same sympathy and goodwill were still fully intact by the time of Charles’ arrival at Woburn on 20 July. Welcomed both ‘honourably and affectionately’, he was also reunited now with Jack Ashburnham, who had made his way safely to the Netherlands after his flight from Newcastle and thence to the queen at Paris, where, to the king’s annoyance, he had joined the chorus urging him to drop his opposition to the covenant and become a ‘King of Presbytery’. Any earlier spat was swiftly forgotten, however, as Charles not only welcomed Ashburnham but promptly installed him, along with Berkeley, at the forefront of negotiations with the army, which lasted throughout the following week. For Oliver Cromwell’s son-in-law, Commissary General Henry Ireton, had not only been busy with the army’s peace proposals, but appeared to be favouring a more moderate approach, opposing the excesses of Republican and Leveller extremism, and suggesting instead what amounted to a form of constitutional monarchy, encompassing King, Lords and Commons. Plainly, the ferment within the army had alarmed him deeply, and to this extent he was well suited to the task of forging some kind of workable agreement.
But if Ireton’s intentions were statesmanlike, his tone was frequently waspish, and his task was complicated by the ongoing obstructiveness of the king, who appears to have regarded his negotiations with the army as a mere preliminary, believing that the generals had little power to carry out their undertakings and that Parliament was in any case certain to outbid them in terms of its own proposals, which were sure to follow. The result was a clash of personality between the Commissary General and the king, which was clear from the outset, as the military man resorted to sharp sentences, refusing to wrap up a denial in the kind of deferential manner to which the king was accustomed, and Charles opted for the kind of hauteur that hardly befitted his present circumstances. ‘You cannot do without me,’ Ireton was told by his adversary at the beginning of negotiations. ‘You will fall to ruin if I do not sustain you,’ the king continued, provoking a predictably unsmiling and emphatic response from the general himself. ‘Sir,’ he replied, ‘you have an intention to be the arbitrator between Parliament and us, and we mean to be it between your Majesty and Parliament.’ And when Charles remarked later that ‘I shall play my game as well as I can’, Ireton was equally quick to counter by reminding him that ‘if your Majesty have a game to play, you must give us also leave to play ours’.
In light of such tensions, it was no mean achievement, then, that Ireton’s peace terms, known as the Heads of the Proposals, still went much further than those offered by Parliament a year earlier – so much so, indeed, that it was widely rumoured that Charles would be back in Whitehall within a week. While control of the militia was to pass for ten years to a Council of State dominated by senior officers, and church attendance, like use of the Prayer Book, would no longer be obligatory, the king would nevertheless be under no compulsion to take the Covenant or establish Presbyterianism. Though bishops were to be stripped of their temporal authority, Royalists were nevertheless to be treated with commendable leniency, accompanying the offer of a general amnesty for all but five of fifty-eight ‘delinquents’. Nor were Ireton’s other offers any less accommodating than the king could reasonably expect. Parliament was to be granted the right to raise revenue without royal approval for ten years, and the same newly appointed Council of State would participate with him in the conduct of foreign affairs. In the meantime, the existing Parliament would end within the year, to be replaced by new biennial Parliaments, elected upon an extended franchise operating with new constituencies reformed according to tax assessments.
Under the circumstances, the army’s terms appeared to offer Charles – as his own advisers were keen to emphasise – the opportunity to achieve by peaceful means the best he could reasonably hope for: a face-saving way out of a no-hope situation and, more importantly still, the prospect of gradual recovery in the longer term. Indeed, in the hands of a shrewd tactician like his father or eldest son, they could have provided the basis for a substantial restoration of royal authority over years to come. Biennial parliaments in particular, and the added prospect of eventually regaining control of the militia and government appointments, offered considerable scope for party-building and political manoeuvre. Even the bishops and the Prayer Book were to be allowed to continue where desired, affording room for at least the possibility of some kind of Anglican resurgence at a later date. Clearly, both the General Council, whom Ireton represented, and their allies among the leadership of the Independents in Parliament were prepared to risk all at a time when the anger among common soldiers appeared to be growing by the day. For it was to the ‘shame of men’, some argued, and a ‘sin against God’ that too many of their leaders were prepared ‘to kneele, and kiss and fawne upon’ the king, still surrounded as he was by ‘deceiptfull Clergy’ and immersed ‘over head and eares in the blood’ of ‘dearest friends and fellow commoners’.
So when trusted members of Charles’ own circle urged acceptance at all costs, the stakes were apparent. ‘Never was a crown so nearly lost so cheaply recovered as his Majesty’s would be,’ insisted Sir John Berkeley, if only he were to seize the moment and submit without delay. Though few had realised it – and least of all Charles – the intervention of Cornet Joyce at Holdenby had actually been nothing less than critical, depriving him of his best chance of an immediate restoration and introducing the new and volatile influence of the army over his fate. Yet even at the eleventh hour, the king had now been offered a lifeline, only to spurn it. Convinced that once the army understood its own interests it would readily grant both him and his people ‘what is their own’, he set out to ply the military commanders with promises of peerages and promotion, and was surprised when the bait was duly rejected. Believing that support for him was growing in London and Scotland, he had not hesitated either to send General Fairfax a less than honest promise denying the widespread rumours that he was now trying to cultivate the Presbyterians.
It was Charles’ fatal flaw, in fact, that, in failing to reconcile himself to realities, he constantly hoped for more from someone else, depending all the while upon his enemies’ divisions and consistently overestimating his personal capacity to exploit to best advantage what he wrongly perceived as a budding counter-revolution in the capital. The attempt by Independents to impeach eleven Presbyterian leaders in the Commons and gain control of the London militia had led, therefore, to a string of events that utterly clouded his judgement at the critical moment of decision. On 21 July, huge crowds had gathered in the City to support the signing of a Solemn Engagement which pledged to uphold the Covenant but secure the king’s restoration on the terms set out in his letter of 12 May. Four days later, moreover, there was widespread rioting, which led to the return of the eleven members and the flight of the Independents. Surely enough, on 22 July, Charles’ misapprehensions were finally set in stone when John Maitland, 2nd Earl of Lauderdale, approached him with the vain assurance that the Scots were at last willing to secure his authority by invading England.
A more astute politician would at least have toyed with the army’s proposals more seductively. Cromwell, Ireton and other officers had urged him to write ‘a kindly letter to the army’, giving it his blessing in restoring order and disowning the actions of the mob. But when the Heads of the Proposals were formally presented to him on 28 July, Charles was at his most brutally dismissive, notwithstanding the conviction of Bellièvre, the French ambassador, that he could still have carried the army with him. Rather than acknowledge any aspect of their efforts, he subjected Ireton and his associates to what Berkeley despairingly termed ‘very tart and bitter discourses’. By the time that Charles finally ‘recollected himself’ after Berkeley had warned him that if ‘he had some secret strength and power that I do not know of, he should conceal the fact’, the damage was already done. Lauderdale was promptly barred from further access, on the assumption that he was plotting an invasion, while Colonel Rainsborough went back to the army’s ‘agitators’ to make clear that further attempts at negotiation were now pointless. All that was left, indeed, for the final collapse of the king’s strategy was the restoration of the ejected Independents to their place in Parliament, which duly occurred on 4 August when Fairfax marched into London at the head of 16,000 troops, and Denzil Holles fled, along with the rest of the eleven members whose impeachment the soldiers had demanded.
Fairfax’s entry had been, in fact, a carefully staged demonstration not only of the army’s strength, but of its discipline too. A day earlier, he had drawn up his men on Hounslow Heath – their massed ranks stretching for a mile and a half – and escorted the two Speakers, fourteen peers and 100 or so MPs in review of them. Moreover, not a shot was fired nor a sword drawn when the general’s regiments circled the City the next day, or when the returning members were escorted to the Palace of Westminster amid cries for ‘Lords and Commons and a free Parliament’. On the contrary, Fairfax’s men wore laurel leaves in their hats and church bells pealed, and to complete the triumph, all twenty of his regiments staged a final parade that Saturday, before marching to Cheapside with colours flying, trumpets braying and drums beating. They took, it was said, not so much as an apple, and would gladly have brought the king with them, to place him once more upon his throne, had he not missed the unique and fleeting opportunity placed before him less than a fortnight earlier.
If Charles had grasped the nettle by pledging himself there and then to the Heads of the Proposals, Fairfax, it seems, would not have hesitated, irrespective of Parliament’s response. For when Berkeley had asked Ireton and his fellow emissaries how they would respond to any refusal by Presbyterian members to accept their peace terms, he was given to understand quite clearly that the desired outcome would have been achieved by leaving potential opponents no choice, presumably by excluding enough Presbyterians to secure a majority. Thereafter, since the very first clause of the Heads of the Proposals stipulated an early dissolution of Parliament, followed by a general election, the likely result was a landslide victory in favour of a settlement which already had the support of the army, the ‘royal independents’ and, above all, the king himself. Ironically, of course, the army would indeed purge Parliament only sixteen months later – with unhappy and deeply unpopular results. But while the purpose of this later purge was actually to prevent the restoration of the king, the effect in August 1647 would have been the diametrical opposite.
In the event, Charles had certainly been ill-advised by others. On the one hand, Sir Lewis Dyve, his former major-general of Dorset, who was now a prisoner in the Tower, had grossly overestimated the potential of the forces lately raised in the City, while the Presbyterian Colonel Joseph Bamfield had also hopelessly poisoned the king’s mind against Cromwell and Ireton. But Charles, to his great cost, had nursed his grievances and indulged his own indignation at the generals’ presumption far too readily. And when he arrived at the Palace of Oatlands – ‘a large and beautiful house of the Queen’s upon the River of Thames’ – on 13 August for what would prove a ten-day stay, he remained stubbornly impervious to the mounting tide of events on every side. Indeed, his mood was said to have been ‘very merry’ as he travelled from Maidenhead to Woburn on 20 July, and on to Latimers in Buckinghamshire and Moore Park – ‘a place of much pleasure’ – some 2 miles from Watford. There he dined with Lord Cary, admiring the ‘curious gardens’ and ‘water-works’, before making a final stop en route at Stoke, a ‘fair house’ belonging to Lord Chief Justice Cook. Throughout this leisurely passage, he had continued to busy himself with the niceties of constitution-making, offering little and achieving less, and upon his arrival at Oatlands, which to his disappointment possessed no tennis court, he wrote encouragingly to Ormonde and Digby in Dublin, to the Covenanters in Scotland and to Edward Hyde on the Continent.
Nor did Charles’ arrival at Hampton Court, his final destination, on 24 August serve in any way to shake him from his slumbers. Indeed, captivity continued to sit lightly upon him as he was now placed under the charge of Cromwell’s cousin, Colonel Edward Whalley. The palace had been made ready by Clement Kinnersley, who ensured that it was ‘amply furnished’ and suitably prepared for the establishment of the royal court that now re-emerged around the king. ‘And a Court it now appeared to be,’ remarked Sir Thomas Herbert, ‘for there was a revival of that lustre it had formerly’, as noblemen mustered in numbers, chaplains performed their duties and ‘every one’ of the king’s servants was ‘permitted to attend in their respective places’ to execute ‘his services in the accustomed form and state’. ‘Intercourse was free between King and Parliament,’ Herbert also observed, ‘and the Army seemed to endeavour a right understanding among different parties: which gave hopes of an accommodation.’ Fairfax and the other military commanders were, indeed, said to be ‘much at Court’ and undertaking ‘frequent conference with the King in the Park’ and elsewhere. To complete the picture of uncanny calm and affability, we hear too how ‘no offence at any time passed among the soldiers of either party’. On the contrary, ‘there was an amnesty by consent, pleasing, as was thought, to all parties’.
All in all, it was small wonder, perhaps, that Herbert should speak so glowingly of ‘these halcyon days’. Berkeley, Ashburnham and Legge were all on hand to advise as the commissioners from Parliament remained in constant attendance and the stream of visitors from London – including not only various aldermen, but Cromwell, his wife, his daughter and her recently married husband, Henry Ireton – filled the king’s spacious Presence Chamber to overflowing. There was ample scope too, it seems, for leisure. ‘To John Powell for 4 billiard staves with pins, balls and porte provided for His Majesty … £6 0s. 0d.’ runs an entry in the Exchequer Rolls for 21 August, as the king also indulged his love of hunting and tennis, ‘a recreation he much desires to use for health’. His children came over for visits – sitting for portraits by the miniaturist John Hopkins – while he, in turn, made at least one trip to Sion House, some 7 miles away, to sup with the Earl of Northumberland, the man still entrusted with the care of young Princess Elizabeth and her brother the Duke of Gloucester. ‘The Earl,’ wrote Herbert, ‘welcomed the King with a very noble treat’, which extended, it seems, to his followers, who ‘had their tables richly furnished’.
Since Charles had given his word not to escape, he had virtual freedom of movement, too, within the grand confines of Hampton’s 1,500 rooms. But he remained, of course, under close supervision and enjoyed little communication with his wife in particular, though he seemed somehow less troubled by this inconvenience than formerly. When Oliver Cromwell and his fellow officers entered London in August, Henrietta Maria had attempted to suborn him with almost unlimited wealth, lands and titles in return for his assistance in restoring her husband to the throne. But she had failed abjectly, and although some of her jewels had been redeemed with the help of a shipment of tin mined in Cornwall before the final defeat of the Royalists, her lack of funds had become increasingly noticeable at her hard-pressed Court in Paris, where she confined herself largely to the consolations of prayer and the company of Henry Jermyn, who continued to immerse himself in the social life of the French capital and to revel in the considerable popularity he enjoyed amid the Parisian elite. So preoccupied was he now with the time-consuming business of courting friends in high places, he had begun to delegate the task of transcribing and deciphering the queen’s letters to Abraham Crowley, and there was talk before long, too, that he was diverting some of her funds to his own use. Not altogether ungenerously, therefore, Madame de Mottville described him as a ‘rather worthy man’, though she was quick to point out, too, that his mind ‘seemed very narrow and more fitted for petty things than great ones’. Rumours of his illicit relationship with the queen were also still circulating, though Lady Denbigh at least was prepared to deny them, complaining to her son about the ‘untruths’ which were as common as ever in letters arriving in England.
There was, indeed, a general atmosphere of recrimination and spite at Henrietta’s parsimonious French Court, to which increasing numbers of self-seeking Royalists had gravitated in a vain search for rich pickings. By now she had given so much of her money away to help her husband’s cause that her scope for patronage of any kind was all but gone, and violent quarrels were not uncommon among her visitors. When Montrose visited the Louvre, in fact, he, like others, was shocked by the prevailing air of futility and discontent. For individuals like the queen’s old friend Chevalier de Jars, whom she had helped release from the Bastille, continued to make trouble, while others in her intimate circle, such as Endymion Porter, struggled in vain to improve the tone. A diplomat enjoying a considerable reputation in the world of art and letters, Porter had acted as a messenger for the queen and was described by Anthony Wood in his Athenae Oxonienses as ‘beloved by two kings: James I for his admirable wit and Charles I for his general bearing, brave style, sweet temper, great experience, travels and modern languages’. But even the portly Porter was not without his detractors, it seems, since he too had been reduced to self-seeking poverty and his Catholic sympathies were another bone of serious contention, as a parliamentary report of the day, highlighting ‘his fat guts, peppered with popery’, made manifestly clear.
‘I am weary of this place,’ Lady Denbigh wrote from Paris to her son, ‘the air is not good, and to be deprived of your company and the rest of my children is very troubling to me.’ But for the queen, by contrast, even the presence of her own offspring had not been entirely trouble-free. That summer, to Henrietta Maria’s great delight, she had been reunited with her youngest daughter after Parliament had ordered the girl’s carer, the Countess of Morton, to hand her over into captivity. Unwilling to comply, the countess, dressed in a tattered gown that she had stuffed with pieces of linen to hide her elegant figure, had set off for Dover with the 2-year-old princess, posing as the wife of a French valet. The child herself, meanwhile, had been disguised as a boy and dubbed ‘Pierre’ – somewhat to her displeasure, it seems, since she exclaimed angrily at one point that she was to be addressed as ‘Princess’. Even so, the princess’ precocity had not compromised the escape bid, and the beautiful, intelligent, dark-haired little girl, who so much resembled what her mother had once been, eventually made her way safely to a new life in Paris, where her eldest brother was no less taken with her charm than Henrietta Maria herself.
The Prince of Wales himself, however, continued to be a cause of significant concern for his mother. By now a tall, well-made, black-haired 15-year-old, he had at first refused to join the queen from his refuge in Jersey, and it had ultimately required Jermyn to fetch him in person. Upon his arrival, moreover, the teenage boy had hardly proved a social success. Taciturn by nature, and unable in any case to speak or understand French effectively, he made little impression above all upon Princess Anne-Marie, the niece whom Henrietta Maria had earmarked as a prospective bride. On the contrary, the princess treated him with an icy condescension, having set her own sights upon the Habsburg Emperor rather than the penniless heir to a threadbare English throne, who now lay decoratively at her feet as she watched her favourite comedies, or held flaming torches at her side as she sat before the mirror in her chamber applying her make-up. Even the services of Prince Rupert, who had arrived in Paris as general of all the exiled English and now acted as interpreter, were to little effect. Henrietta Maria’s final resort of lending her niece the few jewels she still possessed proved equally futile when, at the finest ball of the season, Anne-Marie demonstrated more money than taste by appearing with a vast bouquet of flowers strewn liberally with enormous pearls and diamonds, which dwarfed her aunt’s own.
Perhaps it was not altogether surprising, then, that her husband’s own predicament should have failed to dominate the queen’s thinking in quite the way it once did. One of her associates, Father Cyprien de Gamache, noted how her mind now dwelt increasingly upon devotional subjects as she learned through hard experience that honours, wealth, pleasure and grandeur are evanescent and valueless. In spite of all, she had continued to dispatch couriers like Porter to England, and would still write, exhorting and hectoring in the well-worn way. Dr Stephen Goffe was only one among many whom she urged to beseech her husband not to insist ‘too nicely upon terms in the present exigency of his affairs’. But the response had been the familiar one, as Charles complained how the army’s offers simply intended ‘to cajole him to his ruin’, and in the face of such obstinacy, even Henrietta Maria had come, it seems, to face the fact that her future efforts must be made more out of duty than in hope. In spite of all, she had spent her money on her husband’s cause, and soon she would be doing away with her servants, her furnishings and her fine coaches, pawning the last of her jewels in Holland, around which time the Venetian ambassador saw her waiting in Cardinal Mazarin’s office with tears in her eyes, attempting to enlist his assistance.
For his own part, of course, Charles’ apparent reluctance to exchange letters with his wife as freely as he once did may well be partly explained by the uses to which his enemies might put them. The publication of his private letters after their capture at Naseby had taught him, after all, that no man’s malice could be ‘gratified further by my letters than to see my constancy to my wife, the laws, and religion’. ‘Bees will gather honey,’ he had added at the time, ‘where the spider sucks poison’, and in light of this, he had justifiably concluded that all future letters ‘may be liable to envious exceptions’. When, moreover, his everyday circumstances were so much more favourable than they had been at his lowest point at Newcastle in particular, it was again only natural perhaps that he should pine less urgently for his wife. For his overseers were now at pains to maintain the semblance of their royal prisoner’s liberty as he walked the terraces and gravel ways of the gardens and gazed at the Thames, the familiar river so closely associated with his happiest days.
On such occasions, Jeremy Taylor, his favourite chaplain, was often close by – a source of unerring loyalty and constant consolation, and a companion whose learning and discretion made him more than ever at this time the ideal companion for the beleaguered king. The 34-year-old’s literary output would eventually earn him a reputation as one of the finest writers of English prose and the epithet the ‘Shakespeare of Divines’. But, as a protégé of William Laud and a resolute supporter of the Royalist cause, he had nevertheless undergone imprisonment after the siege of Cardigan Castle in 1645, and been at his sovereign’s side for much of the fighting beforehand. For his further efforts as a Royalist apologist and in particular his pamphlet, Episcopacy Asserted, he had also been one of those rewarded, at the king’s request, by the University of Oxford, which had conferred upon him the degree of Doctor of Divinity in 1643. Whilst the king had not altogether agreed with his subsequent Liberty of Prophesying – a treatise on ‘the unreasonableness of prescribing to other men’s faith, and the iniquity of persecuting different opinions’ – Taylor had nevertheless firmly consolidated his place in the king’s affection by the time of his arrival at Hampton Court.
Whether it was this, however, that explains Charles’ eventual decision to reward the chaplain with a ring embellished with two diamonds and a ruby, as well as a watch and some pearls and rubies ornamenting the ebony case in which he kept his bible, is far less certain. For the cleric is known to have lived 10 miles from Mardinam in Carmarthenshire, the home of Joanna Bridges, who was rumoured to be the king’s natural daughter by the Countess of Lennox. According to one tradition, Charles’ later reputation for sexual continence had not applied in his youth, and he had allegedly been led astray – ‘under the guidance of the dissipated and licentious Buckingham’ – at some time between 1622 and 1627. Although by then in her forties, the thrice-married countess was indeed a prominent member of the circle surrounding both Charles and the duke, and was said ‘to be much courted and respected by the Prince’, who, along with his father, accompanied her from one place of entertainment to another, turning up unexpectedly in a variety of resorts with a minimum of etiquette and ‘an abandon of high spirits’. Certainly, a gift of the kind that Charles eventually made to Taylor was highly irregular, and it is hard to explain why the jewels should be given to a royal chaplain at all, unless they were to be passed on to Bridges herself, whom Taylor would eventually marry as his second wife at some point between 1652 and 1656.
By the time of his arrival at Hampton Court, the king’s financial resources were in any case increasingly limited, as a letter from a member of his household, dated 23 August, makes clear. ‘What necessity of moneys is here,’ the letter begins, ‘you have I doubt not sufficiently been advertised by Mr Cresset.’ For it was now not only deemed ‘full time that his Majesty have a new supply of cloathes and some Jewels and other ornaments for the Royal person’, but time too ‘for a further supply of Pewter and Pans and Kettles and divers other necessaries for the kitchen’, as well as ‘Silver for his Majesty’s uses and Linnen and other necessaries which are wanted to accommodate his Majesty’. In reality, as the Exchequer Rolls make clear, the king can hardly have been as badly off for clothes as the correspondent suggests, since two sums of £333 15s and £235 9s had been paid in June to David Murray, the royal tailor, for six suits, coats, cloaks, stockings, gloves and other articles of attire. But four more suits were indeed paid for in August, presumably by outside sources on the strength of a plea for additional funds, along with a further two and some night attire in September: ‘a tennis suit of wrought coloured satin lined with taffeta, a night gown of wrought tabby lined with plush, and a grey cloth hunting suit with necessaries suitable’. In other respects, too, the Exchequer Rolls confirm that, if the king’s stay at Hampton was comfortable, there remained little if any room for undue largesse. Clement Kinnersley appears to have done a sterling job with the £100 he was paid on account for supplying the king’s new residence with ‘beds, sheets, carpets and other necessaries’. Yet no jewels or silver were forthcoming to ease Charles’ predicament – only three horses, one of which was a ‘grey roan’, costing £70.
Well before September was out, however, there were far more pressing matters, even than money, for the king to worry about. For as Sir Thomas Herbert noted at the time, amid his descriptions of ‘halcyon days’ and a newly resplendent royal court, ‘the fairest day is seldom without a cloud’. It was Charles’ great misfortune that, just as toughness made him stubborn, so appeasement made him over-confident, particularly when both Parliament and the army were competing for his favour, as was now the case. In September, therefore, he turned down Parliament’s peace proposals, which were in effect a rehash of the former Newcastle Propositions, explaining now that the Heads of the Proposals ‘were much more conducive to the satisfaction of all interests, and may be a better Foundation for a lasting Peace’. But by failing once again to accompany honeyed words with specific concessions, Charles created only an impasse that made the growing influence of the Levellers within the army – and the risk of general anarchy – daily more perilous. Indeed, far from appreciating at once the imminent danger posed by ‘active and malevolent persons of the army’ – some of whom would soon be wishing to make ‘a dead dog’ of him – Charles was even prepared to toy with the notion of enlisting their support.
Throughout autumn, as frustration at the failure to achieve a satisfactory peace increased apace among common soldiers, the influence of the Leveller leader, John Lilburne, had grown to such a degree that an outright takeover of the army now seemed conceivable. Lilburne, in fact, had been imprisoned in the Tower since July 1646 after denouncing his former commander, the Earl of Manchester, as a traitor, and had managed to establish contact with another prisoner, the Royalist general, Sir Lewis Dyve, who had been incarcerated since the capture of Sherborne Castle in August 1645. By this means, Charles was kept fully apprised of Lilburne’s intention to capture the army, and, no less interestingly, of his wish for an accommodation with the king himself, whose reign remained, in the Leveller leader’s opinion, ‘but as a flea biting’ to the enormities of Parliament. Nor, it seems, was Lilburne the only radical of this mind, for other sectaries were also approaching the throne for assistance, including William Kiffin, the Baptist, who now reported that the king had given him such firm assurances of future goodwill that every effort should henceforth be made to enter into negotiation.
In light of this, Lilburne had therefore actually tried to arrange through Dyve a meeting between Charles and leading agitators within the army, assuring in the process that in pursuit of an agreement, he himself was prepared to pawn his own life. Such was Dyve’s unerring confidence in Lilburne’s curious new tack that he was happy to report on 5 October how ‘within a moneth or six weekes at the farthest the whole army should be absolutely at your Majestie’s devotion to dispose thereof as you pleased’. All that was required to guarantee this happy outcome, Dyve urged, was that Charles should send for six or seven notorious army radicals, including Major White, Captain Reynolds and Edward Sexby, and reassure them of his good intentions. Thereafter, neither Parliament nor the ‘grandees’ who constituted the army’s official leadership would be able to dam the irresistible tide of popular feeling. Charles would be reinstated, the common soldier’s wish for religious liberty satisfied and the peace of the war-torn kingdom guaranteed at a stroke.
On this occasion, however, not even the king was susceptible to such ‘foolish zeal’. Believing, quite rightly, that Lilburne had not gauged the real strength of Leveller support from his prison cell, and fearing too the ongoing strength of the members of the army’s General Council, Charles duly demurred. In the meantime, moreover, reports were soon reaching him of a new and altogether more disturbing brand of extremism within the army’s ranks. Already Lilburne had written a widely publicised open letter, urging soldiers ‘not to trust your great officers at the general’s headquarters no further than you can throw an ox’. But others were now directly ‘intermeddling with affairs of state’ with new and much more far-reaching proposals. In particular, they were reinterpreting the army’s declaration in its Solemn Engagement of June in a much more radical light than originally intended. There it had been stated that ‘we shall not willingly disband nor divide, nor suffer ourselves to be disbanded or divided’, but now it was being suggested that this had not only transformed the army into a corporation independent of the state, but vested ultimate power into its representative General Council – with the effect, as the pamphlet England’s Freedom, Soldiers’ Rights put it, that leading officers ‘being only admitted by mutual consent … would have no power but what was entrusted to them by the soldiers’.
By 18 October, furthermore, there had come a challenge that shook the army to its roots and threatened to give a genuinely revolutionary turn to national politics. It came in the form of a paper entitled The Case of the Army Truly Stated, written chiefly by the Leveller John Wildman, which alleged that senior officers had been perverting the whole intention of the Solemn Engagement by preventing the agitators from redressing the grievances of the people and warning them not to meddle with matters that did not concern them. Worse still, the grandees were supposedly proposing to restore the king with his royal veto intact and to disband the army with few guarantees against further abuse, and every possibility that the king would choose to take his revenge later on. ‘The flood-gates of slavery, oppression and misery are opened upon the nation,’ the paper declared, while ‘the people’s expectations that were much greatened, and their hopes of relief in their miseries and oppressions, which were so much heightened’ were now ‘like to be frustrate’. In such circumstances, only the most drastic measures could suffice. The present parliament should be dissolved within ten months and replaced with one elected by ‘all the freeborn’ aged 21 or over, excepting those who had rendered themselves delinquents by favouring royalism. Liberty of conscience, meanwhile, was to be guaranteed and the entire law of England codified into a single volume written in plain English. Last but not least, it was suggested that the army’s arrears in pay should be found from the sums that had gone to court parasites and the ‘dead stocks’ lying frozen in the vaults of City companies.
From some perspectives, of course, both Charles and his supporters could take heart from the growing fissure in the army, and in a news-sheet of 27 September, the royalist William Smith confidently declared his belief that ‘the officers of the army will come to an agreement with the King for fear of their own factions and the odium they contract from the kingdom’. As so often, there was also consolation of a kind to be had from Scotland, where fears remained that Charles might yet reach agreement with the Independents and the army. In consequence, the earls of Lanark, Loudon and Lauderdale had travelled to Hampton Court and on 22 October delivered a message to Charles declaring their readiness to ‘engage themselves for your restoration and civil interest’ in return for ‘satisfaction in the point of religion’. The following day, indeed, they returned with fifty horsemen and urged the king’s escape to Scotland, though he refused, ostensibly on the grounds that he had given his word not to do so.
In reality, Charles was once again holding out for better terms, particularly since the Scots remained stuck fast to the demand that he sign the Covenant. The Kirk and majority opinion north of the border still demanded as much, and there was the added complication that the Duke of Hamilton was reluctant to commit to invasion while the Scottish army remained under the control of the allies of his foe, Argyle. But prevarication, of course, came at a price of its own, as the realm teetered on what some observers considered to be the brink of anarchy. ‘I hear all things are in very great confusion still,’ wrote Sir Edward Nicholas from the Continent. ‘As the king at first called a Parliament he could not rule, and afterwards Parliament raised an army it could not rule, so the army have agitators they cannot rule,’ Nicholas continued, in one of the aptest summaries of the English Civil War produced by any contemporary. ‘What will the end be,’ he concluded fearfully, ‘God only knows.’
As October ran into November, concerns of this kind seemed especially well founded. For in response to the seething discontent expressed by John Wildman and others, the leading agitators were now invited to discuss their proposals before a committee of the General Council, chaired by Oliver Cromwell. In the event, the Lieutenant-General’s sympathies were themselves complex, exhibiting all the tension that one might expect between the property owner’s yearning for order and the godly officer’s belief that the army, for all its turmoil, was nevertheless a gathered church of the saints. As committed as ever to the principle that all forms of government were ‘but dross and dung in comparison of Christ’, this was nevertheless the country gentleman who had never sounded more conservative than in July, when he had angrily confronted agitator ‘saints’ bent on a coup. ‘Have what you will have, that you have by force I look upon it as nothing’ were his words at that time. Nor had he in the interim altered even slightly the same firm conviction that Leveller demands, if carried to their logical limit, ‘must end in anarchy’: a conclusion that seemed to be borne out all too painfully by the so-called ‘Putney Debates’ which now ensued.
The Case of the Army Truly Stated had been followed, in fact, by the Levellers’ Agreement of the People, and it was this blueprint for an entirely new constitution which set, in effect, the agenda for the series of hotly contested discussions beginning on 28 October at the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Putney. Lilburne’s Leveller allies, like Richard Overton and William Walwyn, had for some time been pouring scorn on the unrepresentativeness of England’s constitution, the iniquities of its laws – particularly those exacting the death penalty for a range of offences against property and those condemning debtors to jail – and the costs of its legal procedures. Initially, their demands had ranged from the stock call for the disestablishment of the Church and the abolition of tithes, to the decentralisation of the legal system and election to all local offices. But by the autumn of 1647, Overton in particular was voicing the need for a new franchise to underpin the sovereignty of the people as a barrier to the supremacy of Parliament. Elaborating the common Leveller claim that the laws were the product of the ‘Norman yoke’ of William the Conqueror and his tyrannical lords, Overton saw them as ‘unworthy a free people’, while Walwyn was even prepared to chide Lilburne himself for his faith in that ‘mess of pottage’, Magna Carta. In their readiness to transcend the letter of the law, moreover, these Leveller leaders found themselves drawing from a well of support which was also spawning even more radical sectarian tendencies. For the fracturing of political authority had encouraged many ‘saints’ to conclude that the law was being superseded by the spirit – a notion which warranted nothing less than the freedom of the ‘godly’ over the tyranny of Presbyterian oligarchs and army generals alike.
At Putney, then, only 6 miles away from what the king now perceived as his decreasingly safe haven of Hampton Court, the stakes could not have been higher, as soldiers’ prayers alternated with impassioned talk of constitutional reform, and ugly whispers of bringing the royal prisoner to justice continued to grow in volume. Charles had, in fact, been growing increasingly melancholy at his enforced captivity even before this latest assault on his peace of mind, and Lady Fanshawe, who had made one of the many war marriages in Oxford, was only one of many to be much distressed by his sadness about this time. ‘When I took my leave,’ she wrote, ‘I could not refrain from weeping.’ For common troopers, as the king well knew, were now ‘of their own accord’ without ‘either authority or countenance’ of their generals, engaged ‘upon fair pretences’. After she had saluted him and ‘prayed to God to preserve His Majesty with long life and happy years’, he had stroked her on the cheek wistfully and confided his growing pessimism. ‘Child,’ he observed, ‘if God pleaseth, it shall be so, but both you and I must submit to God’s will, and you know in what hands I am.’
On the first day of the so-called Putney Debates, the Agreement, with its declaration that the power of the people’s representatives in Parliament should be ‘inferior only to theirs that choose them’, was duly read to the General Council, and Cromwell’s attitude appeared conciliatory. He was not, he assured the spokesmen for the Agreement, ‘wedded and glued to forms of government’, and was equally prepared to acknowledge ‘that the foundation and supremacy is in the people, radically in them’. The following day, moreover, would witness Colonel Thomas Rainsborough’s memorable affirmation, during a gladiatorial contest with Henry Ireton, that the ‘poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he’ and that, therefore, ‘every man that is to live under a government ought first to put himself under that government’. If this were not the case, continued Rainsborough, he ‘would fain know what the soldier hath for all this while fought’ – a view echoed with equal force by Edward Sexby, who remained totally unconvinced by Ireton’s defence of a franchise limited to those who had ‘a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom, whether as freeholders or as freemen of corporations’. Was it not, asked Sexby, ‘a sad and miserable condition that we have fought all this time for nothing’?
And as the onslaught continued, so the radical agenda expanded accordingly. Unlike the captive Lilburne, who was comparatively well disposed to the king, John Wildman was an outright republican, keen to indulge the kind of temperament that relished conflict and conspiracy, and it was almost certainly he who wrote A Call to All the Soldiers of the Army by the Free People of England, which was circulating among soldiers just as the great debate on the Agreement was gathering pace. Denouncing both Ireton and Cromwell in virulent terms, accusing them of leading the agitators by the nose in the General Council while promoting the king’s designs in Parliament, the pamphlet called upon troops to withdraw obedience from any officer opposing the Leveller programme. ‘Ye have men among you as fit to govern as others to be removed,’ the argument ran. ‘And with a word ye can create new officers.’ The time had arrived, therefore, to form ‘an exact council’ and join hands in it with the ‘truest lovers of the people ye can find to help you’, so that a free parliament might be established ‘by expulsion of the usurpers’.
By now, in fact, 400 men of Colonel Robert Lilburne’s foot regiment had already defied Fairfax’s orders to march to Newcastle, threatening ironically enough to declare for the king, while Leveller propaganda was suggesting that as many as sixteen regiments, including seven of foot, were in open support of their programme. Nor, when the debates at Putney resumed on Monday, 1 November, was there any sign of passions abating. On the contrary, as Cromwell reopened proceedings by inviting those present to report any divine guidance they may have received in answer to their prayers, the result was nothing less than an open invitation to those who felt that God had withdrawn his presence from them because their leaders persisted in trafficking with the king. As Lieutenant-Colonel William Goffe put it, ‘this hath been a voice from heaven to us, that we have sinned against the Lord in tampering with his enemies’, while in the case of a certain Captain Bishop, the message from above seems to have been blunter still, since, after due reflection, he had concluded that no good could come from ‘compliance to preserve that man of blood, and those principles of tyranny’, which God ‘hath manifestly declared against’.
Under such pressure, even the members of the General Council could not remain impassive, and on 5 November a resolution urging Parliament to make ‘no further addresses’ to the king was duly enacted as a prelude to one final effort by Lord Saye to isolate Charles from the Scots, and pressurise him into accepting the Heads of the Proposals. Three days later, it was announced too that a general rendezvous was to be called with a view to settling the ‘many distempers … reported to be in the several regiments’. Plainly, discipline would have to be restored by a combination of firmer pressure upon the king and, as events would prove, even more decisive action against dissenters within the army’s ranks. For on 15 November, at Corkbush Field near Ware, Oliver Cromwell personally oversaw the crushing of the Leveller cause. Faced at last with the need to opt for order over liberty, he had chosen to impose what Fairfax later described as ‘an absolute Submission and Conformity to the ancient Discipline of the Army’ upon defiant soldiers wearing copies of their cherished Agreement in their hats, overwritten with the slogan ‘England’s freedom and soldiers rights’.
In the process, Cromwell had seen fit to charge, sword in hand, at those members of his beloved New Model Army who resisted the order to comply, though initially only one mutineer paid the ultimate price for his defiance. Up to nine ringleaders were court-martialled on the spot and sentenced to death, after which Fairfax pardoned all but three, who were then allowed to draw lots for their lives. The unlucky loser, as it transpired, was Private Richard Arnold, whose execution was intended to serve as an example to the rest of the troops. Eleven others in their turn were taken into custody for future trial, and this time the result would be the death penalty for two – both of whom were once again eventually reprieved. Even Colonel Rainsborough, whose support for the protestors’ cause at Corkbush Field had been the most dangerous of all because of his seniority and popularity within the ranks, was not only spared, but appointed soon after to high office within the navy, though he would die in suspicious circumstances within the year, run through, allegedly, by a Royalist sword during a bungled kidnapping attempt at Pontefract Castle.
Thus were the restless elements within the army, so menacing to the king, duly cowed and tamed. Instead of the Agreement of the People, the General Council had retained the Heads of the Proposals as their agenda for peace, and the spectre of ‘democracy’ had been banished for a century-and-a-half and more. Anarchy was at bay and the imminent threat to the king extinguished. Yet the ‘man of blood’ himself had already fled the scene. Stirred by fears of summary justice and stricken by rumours that had been quick to penetrate the tapestried walls of Hampton Court, he had realised at last that his plans to bide his time while his enemies flew at each other’s throats were no longer viable. Instead, quick decisions were required, and, for once, he took them. For on Thursday, 11 November, leaving his pet greyhound bitch whimpering in his room, Charles I, ruler of three realms, slipped quietly down an unguarded back staircase and out into the squally rain of early evening, to savour his first taste of freedom for eighteen months.