7
‘His Majesty came into our island on Sunday November 14th to my great astonishment … He could not have come into a worse place for himself.’
Sir John Oglander, A Royalist’s Notebook
As search parties, mounted and on foot, fanned out into the park of Hampton Court and beyond, and couriers hurried to the army headquarters at Putney with news of the escape, the king himself was making poor progress. Claiming to know the area well, and therefore acting as his party’s guide, Charles’ immediate objective was an inn at Bishop’s Hutton in Hampshire, where a relay of fresh horses had been prepared. According to the plan, if such it can be called, the intention was to reach the appointed inn about three hours before dawn, but the weather, which was impeding the king’s pursuers, was also disrupting his own flight, and Charles and his followers were soon lost in Windsor Forest, well to the west of their favoured route. In consequence, the first streaks of dawn were already showing through a rack of scudding storm clouds as the riders galloped through the sleeping town of Farnham, and it was growing light when they arrived at their destination, some 16 miles farther on. Tired, tense, drenched and watchful, they dismounted, grateful for the respite, only to be greeted with word of a further worrying setback. For the servant who had been awaiting their arrival soon scurried out to warn them that a local parliamentary committee happened to be meeting within.
Swiftly changing mounts, they therefore resumed their journey without rest or refreshment, still uncertain even now of where precisely they should be heading. Before long, indeed, Charles requested his companions to pause and discuss the next move, at which point a curious discrepancy emerges in the accounts. According to some, a further suggestion from Berkeley that they should make for the West Country to find a vessel to take them abroad was dismissed, in part perhaps because Sir John had previously undermined the king’s trust in his judgement by urging him so strenuously to accept the Heads of the Proposals. Yet Berkeley’s own Memoirs suggest that Charles had not ridden many miles from Hampton Court before he himself asked about the availability of ships for flight abroad. More significantly still, when Berkeley explained that he had never ultimately been told to make such arrangements, the king enquired why Ashburnham had told him otherwise. At which point, we hear, Berkeley confided that his associate was merely trying to increase his influence with the king at the expense of equally trusted counsellors.
If true, this brief exchange was certainly remarkable, and especially so when Charles’ reaction, as described by Berkeley, is taken into consideration. ‘I think thou art in the right’, he is said to have uttered, placing his hand on Berkeley’s shoulder. Regardless of whether the king behaved as described, there were therefore clearly misgivings on Berkeley’s part about Ashburnham’s motives, and tensions within the fleeing party that could only have added to the more palpable strains of escape. In reality, however, a strict watch had been imposed at all ports and harbours in any case, and this was enough to put paid not only to Berkeley’s suggestion of the West Country, but to the king’s lingering preference for Jersey. Almost by default, then, since Charles ‘saw not well whither else to go’, Ashburnham’s original choice of the Isle of Wight was allowed to stand. As an added precaution, he and Berkeley were to cross the Solent alone to seek out Hammond, while Charles and Legge would make for the safety of the Earl of Southampton’s home at Titchfield on Southampton Water. There, if all went well, the party would rendezvous once more when Hammond’s response had been ascertained, though Ashburnham ended the discussion on an ominous note. Shouting back towards the king, as the group separated, he made clear that if he and Berkeley had not returned to Titchfield within twenty-four hours, it was to be assumed that they had been taken. If so, the flight should be resumed without them.
Since Charles was to travel to the eastern side of Southampton Water, Ashburnham opted to lay a false trail by riding over to Lymington, the most westerly of ferry points to the island, which lay some 35 miles away. It was towards evening on Friday, 12 November that he and Berkeley finally arrived. The gales and rain that had blanketed Hampton Court the night before were still in progress, however, making the heaving Solent far too rough to cross that night. Instead, the two impetuous Royalists eventually made the journey early next morning, reaching Yarmouth, a small harbour on the west of the island, without incident. From there, Colonel Hammond’s residence at Carisbrooke Castle lay a further 9 miles away, and they duly reached it a little after 10 p.m., approaching by the path from the west. As sentries marched to and from the guard-house, which was built into the massive west gate amid cannon emplacements that lay all along the three-quarter mile outer earthen bank, Ashburnham and Berkeley had therefore duly reached the point of no return when, for good or ill, their quarry’s sympathies would be tested once and for all.
But Hammond had just set out, in fact, for a meeting with a group of local gentlemen and militia officers in the island capital of Newport, a mile to the east, leaving his pursuers to hurry after him with news that would swiftly shatter any hopes for peace of mind that he may have wished to achieve in his new role. Overtaking him on the road, it was Berkeley, according to Ashburnham, who made a ‘verie unskilfull entrance’ into the business at hand by asking the colonel with no attempt at finesse, if he knew who was very nearby. ‘Even King Charles,’ he continued before Hammond had collected his thoughts, ‘who is come from Hampton Court for fear of being murder’d privately.’ Whereupon, according to the bungling courtier’s own account, his interlocutor ‘grew so pale, and fell into such a trembling, that I really did believe he would have fallen off his horse’ – a reaction neither Ashburnham nor indeed the colonel himself made any effort to deny later. ‘Being herewith exceedingly surprized at present,’ Hammond would inform the Speaker of the House of Lords the following day, ‘I knew not what course to take’, while Ashburnham would describe the Governor as ‘very much discomposed’.
Nor, of course, was Hammond’s palpable sense of alarm any real surprise, since the Isle of Wight had now been transformed all at once into the centre of a new and potentially desperate maelstrom that threatened to consume him. ‘O Gentlemen,’ he declared as the full scale of his predicament became apparent:
you have undone me by bringing the King into the Island, if at least you have brought him; and if you have not, pray let him not come: for what between my Duty to his Majesty, and my Gratitude for this fresh obligation of Confidence, and my observing my Trust to the Army, I shall be confounded.
There was little consolation to be had for Hammond either from Berkeley’s bland assurances that no harm would be done by his refusal to receive the king. For if the king should thereby come to any harm, he asked, what would be the response from his army superiors, not to mention the kingdom at large? All he could offer under the circumstances was the decidedly ambivalent assurance that since the king had escaped from Hampton Court to save his life, he was bound to treat him with ‘honour and honesty’.
It was a response that could hardly have filled Ashburnham and Berkeley with confidence. They had staked all and the dice had not rolled cleanly. Instead, the whole affair now stood finely poised on the fragile sympathy of an apprehensive and reluctant figure whose earlier resolve they had plainly misjudged – a figure, moreover, who remained at bottom a soldier with soldiers’ instincts and, above all, a soldier’s inbred loyalty to his commanders. As the two messengers hesitated, moreover, it was Hammond who now took command of the situation, declaring that the king would not produce so many quibbles, if only his message was presented to him. Ashburnham should therefore take it while Berkeley remained at Carisbrooke as a guarantee of fair play – the implications of which the latter plainly grasped all too clearly as he crossed the bridge into the castle walls looming above him. ‘I had the Image of the Gallows very perfectly before me, he later recalled.
Yet there was still a further twist in store, for as Ashburnham was no doubt thankfully riding away, he was recalled once more by Hammond. There followed another discussion, lasting a quarter of an hour, during which the Governor now suggested that Ashburnham, being a more valuable hostage, should stay in Berkeley’s place. When this suggestion was refused, a further proposal followed: namely, that all three men should leave for the mainland to inform the king of the protection that Hammond was prepared to extend to him. ‘Let us all go to the king, and acquaint him with it,’ said Hammond, having plainly recovered himself sufficiently to have weighed his options and frame the basis of a solution to his quandary. Ashburnham, after all, had played his hand and held no further cards, while Berkeley’s objections, after his associate had agreed to the Governor’s offer ‘with all my heart’, were largely redundant. ‘What do you mean,’ he had hissed, ‘to carry this man to the king before you know whether he will approve of this Undertaking or no? Undoubtedly you will surprise him.’
‘I’ll warrant you,’ was Ashburnham’s only response, however, and even Berkeley’s further declaration that he would not enter the king’s presence ‘before you have satisfied his Majesty concerning your proceeding’ did nothing to stop the inexorable flow of events from this point forth. Setting off for Cowes, where Hammond collected Captain John Basket, commander of the castle there, Ashburnham and Berkeley found themselves sucked into a new venture that both knew was likely to end in calamity. By early evening, nonetheless, they had landed near Titchfield, with Basket’s servants in tow, at which point Ashburnham duly informed Hammond that the king was at the Earl of Southampton’s house. It was no doubt with heavy heart, moreover, that he asked the Governor’s permission to break the news of their arrival, for, like Berkeley, he could not have anticipated a grateful reaction. The king had found the waiting long and hard, and, in the interim, put out feelers once again for a boat to France. He would not appreciate his disclosure to a man who had never enjoyed his full confidence in the first place, and was sure to baulk at his servant’s presumption in changing plan without authorisation.
The immediate prospect for Jack Ashburnham was nothing less than daunting, therefore. The king’s reaction will have come as little surprise to him, for upon hearing the latest development in his bedchamber, Charles’ tightly regal composure swiftly evaporated. ‘Oh, Jack,’ he cried, upon hearing that Hammond and Basket were below, ‘you have undone me, for I am by this means made fast from stirring.’ His place of retreat had been revealed and what he had intended to be exploratory was now obligatory. According to some accounts, indeed, such as Major Huntington’s Narrative, the king expressed such ‘sharp resentment of his condition’ that there was even a ‘vain proposal’ to kill Hammond at this point – to which, we are told, ‘the King did utterly refuse to assent, rather choosing to yield up himself a sacrifice to those blood-thirsty men, who had resolved his destruction and the subversion of the government, than to be guilty of assenting to take away the life of that one vile rebel in cold blood’. Certainly, Ashburnham was desperate enough to have at least mentioned this possibility, if only to rescue some semblance of credibility after his indiscretion. By now weeping copiously, he clearly had no other resort than a show of ham dramatics, from which he doubtless knew the king would rescue him, as indeed he did. ‘The world would not excuse me,’ Charles is said to have uttered, while pacing to and fro and pondering his options. ‘For if I should follow that counsel, it should be said (and believed) that [Hammond] had ventured his life for me, and I had unworthily taken it.’
Both ethics and politics, but above all hard facts, therefore impelled the king to submit himself to what was effectively Hammond’s whim. ‘No,’ he concluded, ‘it is too late now of thinking any thing, but going through the way you have forced me upon, and leave the issue to God.’ The decision ultimately had been as simple as it was unavoidable, though it had not, it seems, been reached quickly, for by the time that the discussion ended, Hammond was having supper in the parlour downstairs and becoming increasingly suspicious at the delay. Indeed, conversation had eventually faltered to such an extent that Berkeley was left with no other option than to send up one of the household servants to remind his master that the officers were waiting. Even then, another half hour passed before Hammond was finally admitted, duly announced by Berkeley, who was treated to a scolding of his own for his part in the day’s mismanagement.
However, as Hammond and Basket entered and kissed the king’s hand, the king appears to have received them cheerfully enough, explaining that he had left London because of the danger from extremists within the army ‘resolved of my death’, and that he was seeking protection until some ‘happy accommodation’ could be reached with Parliament. Once more, the Governor’s response was guarded as he offered to meet the king’s ‘just desires’ in relation to any orders and directions he might receive. But around two hours later, the return crossing was nevertheless underway, and shortly after the party’s arrival at the small town of Cowes, with its trimly whitewashed houses and cottages, arrangements were put in hand for the king’s quarters that night. Since Cowes Castle, a small fort built a century before by Henry VIII, offered nothing suitable, Charles was to be lodged at the town’s one adequate inn, the Plume of Feathers. Here he would spend the night – in an old bed with a carved oak headboard, inscribed, inauspiciously enough, with the text ‘Remember thy end’.
And while Charles, as Berkeley informs us, knelt in fervent prayer beside the bed, taking the inscription as a bad omen, Hammond was already at work, as he would be throughout the night, inspecting the dispatches that had already come in during the day, including the order closing the ports, and dictating his own correspondence – the most important item of which was a message informing Parliament of the king’s arrival. Carried by Major Edmund Rolph, Chief Officer at Carisbrooke, who was richly rewarded to the tune of £20 for his services, it arrived on the 15th and was greeted with a mixture of relief and trepidation. For while Charles’ continued liberty opened a veritable hornets’ nest of disturbing possibilities, so too did his apprehension by an apparent tool of the army’s General Council. All, no doubt, would become clear over the days to follow, as would Hammond’s precise sympathies, though for now at least the only available options were patience, vigilance – and prayer.
Across the Isle of Wight, meanwhile, word of the king’s arrival was already spreading. ‘[That] Sunday morning at church,’ wrote Sir John Oglander, ‘I heard a rumour that the king was that night landed at Cowes.’ Sitting among the other parishioners at Brading Church during morning service, his first reaction, it seems, was to dismiss the tale as gossip, but by the end of the day all doubt had dissolved. For at evening prayer, a servant of Sir Robert Dillington of Knighton, a neighbour of the Oglanders, had arrived to confirm the king’s arrival and deliver news of an important meeting to occur the following morning. ‘Governor Hammond,’ Oglander recorded, ‘commanded me, as all the gentlemen of the island, to meet him at Newport the next day by nine in the morning.’ So there could be no doubting either the urgency or the gravity of the business at hand, and no question that the meeting in store would be avidly attended by all concerned.
When Hammond appeared at Newport next morning, indeed, he encountered a crowded audience, abuzz with speculation, which he did his best to allay by candour, calm and a commendable focus upon the here-and-now practicalities entailed by a most unexpected and potentially momentous development. After explaining the king’s flight from Hampton Court in fear of his life, the colonel then mentioned that only three ferry points were now open, albeit under guard, and that there had been reports of Levellers upon the island. Any such groups found meeting were therefore to be dispersed, and as a further precaution all captains of the local militia were to renew their commissions, so that there would be no question of their authority to act in any emergency. Beyond this, it seems, there was to be an emphasis upon normality and tending the king’s present needs as effectively as possible – a priority, which became even more apparent after Sir Robert Dillington’s request that the assembled gentlemen might visit the king in person after dinner. Yes, by all means, responded Hammond, it would be a particularly fit time once their royal visitor had dined. ‘And truly,’ he added, ‘I would invite you all to dinner’, were it not for the fact that ‘I want, extremely, fowl for His Majesty’.
In the meantime, as the hard-pressed colonel cadged food on his behalf, the king and his escort were already underway for Carisbrooke Castle amid a throng of curious bystanders and well-wishers anxious to catch a glimpse of his passing. As he rode through Newport, a gentlewoman plucked a damask rose, the last remaining flower in her garden after the autumn frost, and gave it to him with a pledge that she would pray for his well-being. Others came to let him know that the island’s inhabitants, with the exception of the governors of the castles and Hammond’s officers, were unanimously for him and that he should not fear. Carisbrooke Castle, after all, was said to be garrisoned with only twelve old men, all of whom were well-disposed to the king, and there was word, too, that Hammond might yet be won over, or coerced if necessary. If the king could bide his time, all would be well, since his cause was just and his subjects still loyal.
If these sentiments, which the king still shared fully, were not enough to buoy his spirits, the designated meeting with the island’s leading gentlemen would complete the task admirably. When his visitors arrived, the king had already dined as arranged, but was busy writing in his room and they were left to wait in anticipation for half an hour. His eventual appearance did not disappoint, however, as his visitors kissed his hand loyally before being told in a short speech how he had been ‘forced from Hampton Court by Levellers’. ‘I have put myself in this place,’ he declared solemnly, ‘for ye preservacion of my life’, adding how it was his sincere wish that ‘not a drop moore of Christian bloude showlde bee spilt’. His stay, he implied, would be a short one, lasting only until a political solution had been reached, and in the meantime the burden upon the islanders would be limited. No doubt unaware of Hammond’s earlier plea, he even avowed that ‘I shall not desior so much as a capon from anye of you’. After which, Colonel Legge came forward to read the declaration to Parliament that Charles had left upon his table at Hampton Court.
Overall, the meeting was an undoubted success, and even an anxious enquiry from Colonel Legge, as the audience departed, could not dampen Sir John Oglander’s improved spirits. What was to be done, the colonel asked, if a greater number of the Leveller faction arrived in the island than could be resisted by the local people – what measures could then be taken to guarantee the king’s safety? ‘None that I know,’ Oglander replied, ‘but to have a boat to convey him from the island.’ For even at this stage, notwithstanding damask roses and assurances from Hammond, the background hum of subterfuge and anxiety was understandably still in evidence. Hampton Court might now be far off, but the king’s enemies were not at rest. His flight, indeed, had only added to their calls for a more final solution to the problem he personified, and under the circumstances, the primary need was for vigilance and planning, amid a veneer of everyday normality. The king would enjoy the moment as best he could and keep his counsel close – as was demonstrated by his visit to Oglander’s country house near Sandown only three days later. ‘[He] dined with me at Nunwell,’ Oglander recorded, ‘and during the time he lived in our island he went to no gentleman’s house besides. In the Parlour Chamber I had some speech with him which I shall forbear to discover.’
At least the hospitality on offer at Nunwell is likely to have been fit for a royal visitor, since the host appears to have been something of a gourmet. Upon his posting to the island, Oglander had at once increased the number of servants within his household, and he admitted in his memoirs, with no hint of brashness, that ‘indeed he kept a very good table’. When the king first visited Oglander on the Thursday after his arrival upon the island, in fact, his host’s account book recorded the purchase, for £1, of ‘sweetmeates for his Matie’, and with the king henceforth a regular visitor, the honourable gentleman even wrote to his mother at Chertsey to enlist her services as a hostess. No expense within his means would be spared, no effort stinted, it seems, in making the king’s visits as pleasurable as possible, though Oglander’s services, to his credit, were never rendered to curry favour or glean political advantage. On the contrary, he was discretion personified, putting little in writing about the war and even less about the royal captivity. While he remained the staunchest of Royalists, he continued to maintain both an unwavering appreciation of the Crown’s shortcomings and the keenest possible awareness that the king’s apparent supporters were not, in all cases, to be depended upon.
Intelligent, perceptive, self-effacing and worldly wise, Oglander had been born at Nunwell in 1585 into a family that, as he himself claimed, ‘came in with ye conquest out of Normandie’. Thereafter, we hear of him graduating at the age of 18 from Balliol College, Oxford, on 8 July 1603, and becoming a student of Middle Temple the following year: a common entry point on the path to high office for many a gifted scion of worthy gentry stock. Knighted on 22 December 1615, he was appointed Deputy-Governor of Portsmouth in 1620 by the Earl of Pembroke, before becoming Deputy-Governor of the Isle of Wight four years later. In 1625, he was elected MP for Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight, sitting until 1629 when the king opted to rule without Parliament for eleven years. It was during this period particularly that he established his loyalty and value to the Crown, becoming High Sheriff of Hampshire in 1637 and establishing a well-deserved reputation as an energetic collector of Ship Money.
Twice arrested during the subsequent war, Oglander had, however, undergone loss and demotion for the Royalist cause before being treated leniently and rehabilitated in 1645. Thereafter, he had lived quietly, occupying himself with the management of his farm and occasional trips to Bath for his health. But it was no surprise that Charles should have established such a firm link with him at this time. Ashburnham would claim, as we have seen, that he had initially intended Charles’ ‘concealment’ at Nunwell ‘until the king had gained experience of the Governor’s intention to serve him’. Oglander would continue to visit the king at Carisbrooke even after security arrangements were considerably tightened in January. ‘I went most commonly to see him once a week,’ his journal makes clear, ‘and I seldom went but His Majesty would talk with me sometimes almost a quarter of an hour together.’ As a chronicler, it is true, he often accepted as true a good deal of rumour, and his chronology is sometimes defective. But such was his sensitivity and passion for his journal that at times of particular emotion, he is known to have made certain entries in his own blood. ‘I could do nothing but sigh and weep for two nights and a day,’ he would write after a surge of pessimism for the king’s prospects overwhelmed him, and ‘the reason of my grief’, he added, was that there was no possible place where the king ‘could be more securely kept’ than where he now found himself.
By the time that Charles’ horse first clattered across Carisbrooke Castle’s moat bridge, moreover, the same sense of foreboding may well have been dampening his own spirits after the initial good wishes and conviviality of the previous hours. Standing on a commanding chalk plateau above a small village of the same name, about a mile and a half south of Newport, the castle was by any standards a formidable edifice. Indeed, from its 200ft vantage point at the centre of the island, it dominated the Bowcombe Valley beneath, and so complex were its fortifications that it was considered by some to be all but escape-proof. The area contained by the outer enceinte covered some 20 acres, within which, at the north-western end, was the castle itself surrounded by a curtain wall. From the high stone keep in the north-east corner of the castle’s courtyard, the view encompassed the Solent, the New Forest beyond it to the north, and to the south, about 6 miles away, the hills above Ventnor. To add to the difficulty of any escape, almost no buildings interrupted the mile-long expanse of fields and copses before Newport, which was also easily visible from the castle walls.
From the time of its original construction in the late Roman period, Carisbrooke had certainly undergone extensive development. It was probably the place in 530 where the islanders were defeated by the invading Saxons, who gave it the name of Wihtgarasburh, ‘the fortress of the men of Wight’, which was later corrupted to Garisbrook. Thereafter, following the Norman subjugation of the isle by William FitzOsborne, Earl of Hereford, the modern castle steadily grew in size and prowess between its foundation in the twelfth century and its reinforcement, under threat of attack from Spain, at the end of the sixteenth century. Most notably of all, in 1597, Federigo Giambelli designed a massive encircling defensive work, or ‘trace Italienne’, to encase the entire castle, including the unused eastern bailey. Comprising three-quarters of a mile of stone-faced earthworks within a system of outer ditches, and defended by cross-fire from gunports in the sophisticated arrowhead bastions at the corners, it resulted in a ring of defences that were altogether less vulnerable to artillery attack than the rubble-filled curtain walls of the inner castle. Although the area was large, the skilful placement of the cannon embrasures guaranteed effective coverage by defensive fire, while a ‘covered way’ just outside the parapet of the earthworks facilitated the safe and rapid deployment of defending troops.
But while the castle’s fortifications had been steadily enhanced since the time of its creation, so too had its living accommodation, largely as a result of the efforts of the last of the mighty de Redvers family, Countess Isabella, widow of William de Fortibus, Earl of Albemarle, who lived in the castle in considerable comfort from 1269 and ruled the island as queen in all but name. The Great Hall, for example, was originally built by William de Vernun during his custodianship from 1184–1217, but it was the countess who rebuilt it in the second half of the thirteenth century, and it was she too who added domestic chambers and a kitchen to the north under the curtain wall, as well as the Chapel of St Peter opening out of the Great Hall. Not only did she equip the castle with the first glass in the British Isles, she also, it seems, installed a vast fish tank, and in doing so set a precedent for further improvements by her successors. Towards the end of the fourteenth century, William de Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, built the block at the south end of the Great Hall, which eventually came to form part of the Governor’s house, and it was Sir George Carey, Governor from 1582–1603, who undertook further extensive additions prior to the king’s arrival in 1647. Under his direction, the Great Hall was raised by a storey and a mezzanine added in Montacute’s building, while St Peter’s Chapel was dismantled and converted into rooms and lobbies on both floors, thus affording communication throughout the entire range of buildings. A further storey was also added over Countess Isabella’s building to the north of the Great Hall, along with a new kitchen and the Chief Officer’s House along the curtain wall beyond.
By the time that Charles I first took up residence in his new abode, therefore, it had grown into a particularly imposing structure. ‘Carisbrooke Castle, when brought to perfection on my plan,’ Federigo Gianibelli had claimed upon his commission, ‘will be one of the strongest places in Europe.’ From one perspective at least, his proud boast had proved far from hollow. Yet this immense fortification, so well designed for keeping an enemy out, was by no means as ideally suited to the task of keeping prisoners in as many contemporaries assumed. On the one hand, as a result of the porous chalk on which the castle stands, the outer ditches and last vestiges of the Norman moat inside were all dry and comparatively easy to traverse. Furthermore, those same outer defences, which were so daunting for any potential attacker, were still low enough for any escapee to jump from without injury, while their considerable length made the castle’s perimeter especially difficult to patrol. Indeed, the only unequivocal asset for any would-be jailer was arguably the high curtain walls of the inner Norman courtyard, where the king now found himself lodged.
There stood within this area, just beyond the stone bridge over the moat and the fourteenth-century drum towers of the gatehouse, a complex of domestic buildings containing the guardrooms and soldiers’ quarters. To the left, at the northern side of the courtyard, the officers were lodged in a splendid two-storeyed house built in the 1580s, and from here a central doorway led, by a facing flight of stairs, to the upper floor and to a long gallery between the hall and the curtain wall. The rooms to either side, meanwhile, were illuminated at each level by large bay windows, from which the castle chapel of St Nicholas – a simple, rectangular construction, divided by a choir screen – could be clearly seen. Finally, projecting south into the middle of the courtyard from the north curtain, was the Norman hall itself – complete with further domestic quarters at its southern end – which was to house the newly arrived king in a style wholly fitting for his status. For although no substantial additions or alterations had been made after 1593 and only a skeleton staff was present at the time of king’s arrival, the castle as a whole had been maintained in comparatively good condition, so that nothing further seems to have been needed for his reception beyond the provision of suitable furniture, plate and hangings.
The precise location and layout of the royal apartments remain something of a mystery, however, since there are no surviving plans of the hall as it stood in 1647, and extensive restoration of the building in 1856 resulted in the insertion of new windows and removal of the mezzanine floor in the Great Chamber, which, according to some accounts, may have housed the king’s sleeping quarters. It certainly does seem from contemporary evidence that the royal bedchamber itself had a room above and a room below, and that it consisted of two bedrooms, one of which opened on to backstairs. Thomas Herbert’s Narrative, for example, locates the king’s Presence Chamber ‘under his Majesties bedchamber’, and while this need not necessarily place it immediately below the bedroom, it does at least confirm that the bedroom was indeed at an upper level. Likewise, a letter from the so-called ‘Derby House Committee’ to Colonel Hammond on 7 February 1648 refers to a room over the king’s bedroom, which would locate it at the southern end of the hall in the Great Chamber, in accordance also with various other contemporary references to the backstairs.
To complicate matters further, the Great Chamber, which served as the Constable’s Lodging before the king’s arrival, is today a lofty room, boasting a large Victorian window, with one room below and one above. Yet old drawings, like the one produced by John Livesay in 1798, confirm that before the removal of the mezzanine in the 1850s, this room was itself divided into two storeys. If so, either might have served as the king’s bedchamber, though the one corresponding with the present floor of the Great Chamber seems the most likely, since this would be just one stage higher than the Great Hall – which is likely to have served as both royal Presence Chamber and dining hall – and its importance is confirmed by the elaborate medieval fireplace that can still be seen there. From this vantage point, Charles would have glanced out upon the courtyard from the lowest of a set of four windows in a high, gabled building, abutting the remainder of the Constable’s Lodging.
Nor was the view an entirely unfamiliar one, for he had visited the castle in happier days and knew it well enough. In August 1618, as Prince of Wales, he had dined at Carisbrooke and ‘made divors shots with the ordnaunce’. No doubt he remembered, too, the small, Elizabethan well-house, with its medieval well and treadmill, which had once been turned by prisoners until their replacement by the donkeys that still turn the wheel as a tourist attraction today. The stables to the southern side of the courtyard were untouched, as indeed were the soldiers’ quarters nearby, which remained surprisingly quiet, as Hammond’s regiment had still not followed him over. The scene, indeed, was almost a tonic after the tensions of Hampton Court: a welcome rest-cure of sorts from the tramp of heavy army boots, the continual flow of worrisome intelligence and the wearisome routines of political gamesmanship necessitated by it. All ferries across to the island had been stopped, except at the three regular entry points of Yarmouth, Cowes and Ryde, and these too were now under guard. But at Carisbrooke, as Major Rolphe was hurrying to Westminster with news of the king’s whereabouts, there was little on offer to discourage a consoling illusion of homeliness.
In Parliament, the early precautions taken by Hammond were swiftly approved by both Houses, and it was further resolved that no person who had previously been in arms on the king’s behalf should remain upon the Isle of Wight unless he were a native and had compounded for any prior offence. A guard was to be provided by Hammond, servants appointed and £500 allocated for the royal household, though, with the exception of Scots, no stranger or foreigner was to enter the king’s presence without specific approval from Westminster. Even so, the king was to be kept on a surprisingly long leash, it seems, for, as he ranged about his new domicile in the company of its custodian, he did not hesitate to pose pertinent questions about the present military strength of the island and the number of its inhabitants. Nor was he disappointed by Hammond’s frank responses or the similar liberty he was granted in welcoming familiar faces to Carisbrooke. ‘Thither, so soon as the king’s being there was rumoured,’ observed Sir Thomas Herbert, ‘repaired several of his old servants, and some new, such as his Majesty at that time saw fit to nominate’, for, over a period of ‘some weeks’, there was apparently ‘no prohibition’ in place, leaving those ‘desirous to see his Majesty’ to do so ‘without opposal’.
The early malaise among the remnants of the king’s household left at Hampton Court was not, then, long-lived. Maule, Murray and other attendants had been duly questioned about their sovereign’s flight, but escaped without punishment, while the staff remaining at the palace merely ‘stood gazing at one another’, in Herbert’s words, until going their separate ways. ‘And the master being gone,’ he continued, ‘the diet ceased, so as with sad hearts all went to their respective homes.’ Even loyal Henry Firebrace, it seems, may have taken the opportunity to stay with his wife and daughter in London, though his own account confirms that the respite from royal service was a short one:
As soon as it was publiquely known where his Majestie was, having received a private letter from him to hasten to him, and with what intelligence I could get after I had acquainted his most faithfull friends about London with my going as his Majestie commanded me; I got leave of the Speaker of the House of Commons, and his pass to go (for I had still kept out of their suspition).
He does not give the date of his arrival, but the list of the royal household, which comprised most of those who had served at Hampton Court, was finally approved in the House of Commons on 23 November, and £100 voted for the expenses of their journey. The Moderate Intelligencer of 1 December, moreover, announced their arrival at Carisbrooke thus:
When the new and old attendants came to Court, his Majesty was private, but understanding of their arrival, he came out, shewed cheerfulnesse, gave them all his hand to kisse, and said they had done well when they brought Hampton Court with them. Mr Ashburnham and Colonel Leg are with him, also old servants and chaplains.
The king, then, had even been reunited with the Reverend Doctors Sheldon and Hammond, and on the very same day that the Moderate Intelligencer was announcing their happy return, the royal coach itself was being laboriously shipped across the Solent to carry the king in due splendour along the rough island roads, since, as Herbert relates, ‘His Majesty had free liberty to ride and recreate himself anywhere within the isle, when and where he pleased.’ Making full use of Hammond’s goodwill, he therefore frequently ‘went abroad to view the island and to observe the severall accommodations of it’. In doing so he was also able to enjoy not only the better-known sights but also the hospitality of local people. Early in December, for example, he travelled to the island’s western tip to take in the Needles, an impressive line of chalk columns towering out of the sea, which had once been part of a ridge forming a link with the mainland of Dorset. From there he visited the small town and harbour of Yarmouth before finishing the day with a banquet given by a certain Mrs Urry, probably Alice, the wife of Captain John Urry, at the village of Thorley, a mile to the south-east.
There is a local tradition, too, recorded much later, which describes a visit made by the king to the Undercliff area in the south of the island. While riding one day with his attendants near the little village of Bonchurch, it was suggested to him that he might acquaint himself with the small, medieval church there, and he readily agreed. On their way along the chute that lay on the way down, however, it seems that the king and his followers overtook a funeral procession making its way to the churchyard, whereupon the king reined in his horse and sent an attendant to enquire who was being buried. When the answer came back that it was Sir Ralph Chamberlain – who ‘during his lifetime, had fought and bled for him, and whose death was indirectly caused by wounds received in his service’ – Charles is said to have responded with a remarkable show of sympathy. Dismounting from his horse at the mention of Chamberlain’s name, he appears to have joined the mourners to pay his last respects.
Yet however touching, it was also hardly suggestive of a king in dire circumstance. On the contrary, the laxity of his general treatment at Carisbrooke appeared further concrete proof, not least to himself, that his enemies were finding it increasingly difficult to proceed against him. Like mice that had cornered the cat, it seems, they were not only at a loss as to their next step but increasingly divided as the moment for decision closed in upon them. ‘I am daily more satisfied with this governor,’ the king wrote of Hammond on 23 November, and Parliament, too, seemed anxious to accommodate the prisoner at every turn. On 24 November, the seals had been broken on the royal apartments, and a generous supply of furnishings arrived for the king’s use within the week. Within days of his arrival, he had also gone hunting in Parkhurst Forest, ‘which is very plentifully supplied with deer’, and was soon hawking whenever he wished. Before long, equally remarkably, the avidly Parliamentarian town assembly of Southampton was considering the dispatch of ‘a present of Household provition to his Matie at Carisbrooke Castle’. What, then, could have provided further reassurance of a turning tide as the king pondered his options upon his island retreat?
There was even the steady trickle of intelligence through the castle’s ramshackle security to reinforce Charles’ early confidence. Though Henry Firebrace could not obtain a private interview with the king upon his arrival, he was nevertheless able to find ‘a very convenient and private place’ within the royal bedchamber in which he secreted certain letters that he had brought. That night, moreover, he was able to inform Charles of what he had done ‘by putting a note into his hand as he was going to bed’. Nor was this the end of Firebrace’s service in this particular regard, as his narrative makes clear:
And the next morning, after his retirement, at his private devotions (of which he never fayled) I found his paper in the same place; by which his Majestie was pleased to express his satisfaction in what I had done, and what he had received; and directed the continuance of that place and way of converse, which we made use of (for we had no better) for many weeks.
Before leaving London, indeed, Firebrace had laid down plans for two ‘faithful and unsuspected’ messengers to travel between the capital and the Isle of Wight, in order to maintain a constant means of communication between the king and his friends: an arrangement which could not have been more timely, since the need for such a flow of intelligence was now, if anything, greater than ever, as the latest round of political manoeuvring swiftly gathered pace.
Within days of his arrival at Carisbrooke, in fact, Charles had shown willing to launch a new diplomatic offensive, and while Parliament was digesting the message he had left at Hampton Court, he was already composing, with Hammond’s encouragement, a further, more detailed and more conciliatory proposal. Indeed, it was this document that he had been writing when the island’s gentry visited him on the Monday after his arrival. Finally dispatched two days later, it opened with the suggestion that talks should be resumed, since he now considered himself ‘to be at more freedom and security than formerly’. Though he remained adamant on the issue of the episcopacy and the alienation of their lands, which he deemed not only an affront to his conscience but a breach of Magna Carta, there followed a range of very real, if not particularly novel, concessions. Agreeing, on the one hand, to accept Presbyterian government for three years, with freedom of conscience reserved for all others but Roman Catholics, he also accepted that the long-term future of the Church should be settled by the Westminster Assembly of divines, with the addition of twenty royal nominees. Equally significantly, he was prepared to countenance the appointment of presbyters to oversee bishops’ jurisdiction, and to accept the pruning of royal control in at least two key areas. Control of the militia, for example, was to be ceded to Parliament for his lifetime, as was the right to appoint all senior officers of state, and, in the hope that he might be invited to London in person, there were further guarantees that the army’s arrears would be paid out of royal revenue, and that the king himself would sign an Act of Oblivion annulling any party’s responsibility for the war.
As the proposals were read out at Westminster on 17 November, then, Charles still seems to have harboured hopes of further political progress. But he was enough of a realist to have a number of other ploys in reserve, the most important of which was to open negotiations once more with the army. No doubt emboldened by reports that one of Fairfax’s regiments in Hertfordshire had demonstrated in his favour, Charles therefore lost no time in dispatching Sir John Berkeley to the general, with the purported objective of enlisting protection for the newly arrived royal chaplains. In reality, however, Berkeley was to call for a parley between the king and the army’s leading commanders, drawing on the stock of goodwill he had gained with Cromwell and Ireton, in particular, during the summer negotiations not long passed. He would travel – ‘not without some apprehension’, as he himself admitted – in the company of his cousin, Henry, and call upon Fairfax at Windsor, where ‘a general meeting of the officers’ was in session at the time of his arrival.
Even before Berkeley reached his destination, however, his confidence had been further undermined by two chance meetings en route, the first of which involved a discussion with a messenger of Colonel Hammond’s who had been sent to impress upon the generals the need to ‘clear themselves of their importunate and impertinent Adjutators’. ‘Between Bagshot and Windsor (then the Head-Quarters),’ he recorded, ‘I met Traughton the Governor’s chaplain, who told me he could carry no good news back, the Army being as yet come to no resolution as to the king.’ Yet if this particular exchange had not boded well, the next encounter that Berkeley made only a little later on the very same stretch of road not only shredded any remnants of optimism he may have retained, but carried an irony all of its own, for it involved a figure whose unexpected intervention in the king’s affairs had already proved so decisive some months earlier. In little doubt thereafter that his mission was effectively futile, Berkeley recalled the meeting and what followed it thus:
As I was half way between Bagshot and Windsor, Cornet Joyce, a great Adjutator, and he that had taken the king from Holmby [Holdenby], overtook me. He seemed much to wonder that I durst adventure to come to the Army. Upon my discourse with him I found that it had been discoursed among the Adjutators, whether for their justification the King ought not be brought to a Tryal, which he held in the affirmative, not that he would have one hair of his head suffer, but that they might not bear the blame of the war. I was quickly weary of his discourse; but I perceived he would not leave me until he saw me in Windsor and knew where I lodg’d.
Nor did Berkeley’s eventual meeting with Fairfax and the other generals offer anything other than disappointment, as his description of the encounter makes plain:
After an hours waiting I was admitted, and after I had delivered my Compliment and Letters to the General, I was desired to withdraw; and having attended half an hour, I was call’d in. The General look’d very severely upon me, and after his manner said, That they were the Parliament’s Army, and therefore could not say anything to his Majesty’s motion of peace, but must refere those matters to them, to whom they would send his Majesty’s letters. I then look’d about upon Cromwel and Ireton, and the rest of my acquaintance, who saluted me very coldly, and had their Countenance quite changed towards me, and shewed me Hammonds letter, which I had delivered to them, and smiled with much disdain upon it.
Seeing that this was ‘no place for me’, Berkeley therefore returned anxiously to his lodgings, where he waited from 4–6 p.m., as the grey evening closed in around him, in the hope that one of his army contacts might call. But ‘none of my acquaintance came at me’, he noted in his account, ‘which appeared sad enough’. In consequence, there seemed no alternative but to send out a servant to scour the town for officers known to Berkeley, who might be willing to throw further light upon the situation. This, at least, proved fruitful, for the servant returned with news that he had met one of the general officers who had ‘whispered in his ear’ that he would meet Berkeley ‘at twelve at night in a Close behind the Garter Inn’.
According to Clarendon’s History of the Great Rebellion, the officer concerned was Leonard Watson, the army’s Quartermaster-General, though Berkeley himself gives no detail about his identity other than to emphasise that he was someone who ‘since the tumults of the Army, did mistrust Cromwell, and not long after Ireton’, considering them the ‘archest villains in the world’. But in spite of Watson’s sympathies, he could offer no consolation to Berkeley as the pair shivered in the shadows. ‘I came at the hour, and he not long after’, Berkeley relates, and when asked what news he had bought, the Quartermaster-General’s reply, ‘None good’, was delivered without hesitation. Ireton, it appeared, had proposed at the army council that afternoon that Berkeley ‘should be sent prisoner to London’ and that ‘none should speak with you upon pain of death’. ‘I do hazard my life now by doing of it,’ Watson continued. But even this paled into insignificance with the further revelation that the army was now resolved ‘to destroy the King and his posterity’. Indeed, from the description of Watson’s words given in Berkeley’s Memoirs, plans to this effect were already in place. ‘The way that is intended to ruin the king,’ Watson is said to have revealed, ‘is to send eight hundred of the most disaffected of the Army to secure his Person, as believing him not so now, and then bring him to a Tryal, and I dare think no farther.’ As such, only one course of action was available. ‘This,’ he confirmed, ‘will be done in ten days; and therefore if the King can escape let him do it as he loves his life.’
Numbed and nonplussed by the sudden change of front by Cromwell and Ireton, Berkeley wound his way back to his lodgings in the early hours, still, no doubt, searching for the explanation of their ‘horrid perfidiousness’. In Watson’s view, Cromwell in particular had decided ‘that if we cannot bring the Army to our Sense, we must go to theirs, a Schism being evidently destructive’. ‘And therefore,’ Watson reasoned, Cromwell had ‘bent all his Thoughts to make peace with the Party that was most opposite to the King’. ‘The Glories of the World,’ it seems, had hitherto ‘so dazzled his eyes that he could not discern clearly the great Works the Lord was doing’. But now ‘he was resolved to humble himself, and desire the Prayers of the Saints’ and be thereby ‘reinstated in the Fellowship of the Faithful’. Against his every instinct, therefore, he would appease the Levellers in the interests of army unity, and he would do so under the banner of divine calling – all of which left Berkeley with few options.
It was clear, in the first place, that two letters should be drafted. One, ‘containing a general Relation and doubtful Judgement of things in the Army’, was to be sent to Hammond, and the other, written in cipher, was for the king’s eyes only, informing him of the midnight meeting outside the Garter Inn, naming the informant who had been present, and ‘concluding with a most passionate supplication to his Majesty to mediate nothing but his immediate escape’. With his cousin duly instructed to ride through the night to the Isle of Wight, there was little else for Berkeley to do other than to snatch some meagre sleep before a final visit to army headquarters next morning. The intention was to gain access to Cromwell simply to pass on correspondence that he had brought with him from the king and to receive his response. Beyond this, there was little other point to the journey, if the general’s behaviour that day was any guide.
Yet Cromwell’s earlier hostility was curiously belied by what followed. ‘The next morning,’ Berkeley informs us, ‘I sent Colonel Cook to Cromwel, to let him know that I had Letters and Instructions to him from the King.’ But while the letters concerned appear to have been largely routine in nature, the general’s response was not only uncommonly anxious but surprisingly sympathetic to the king’s interests. For, according to Berkeley’s account, ‘he sent me word by the same messenger that he durst not see me, it being very dangerous to us both, and bid me be assured, that he would serve his Majesty as long as he could do it without his own ruin; but desired that I would not expect that he should perish for his sake’. Against all expectation, then, it was plain that Cromwell was still not intent upon burning all bridges with the king. On the contrary, he was playing out a double game, finely balancing the more radical elements in the army with his own more conservative instincts. He would posture publicly and in private weave contrary schemes of his own, watching all the while for openings and right moments. In this respect he was not alone. For, as Berkeley made haste away from Windsor, the king himself was already offering olive branches to other old enemies.