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ON THE DAY of his death, 10 January 1645, the diminutive Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, dressed in his habitual black. Laud had been a chief supporter of Charles’s rule without Parliament. Facing trial for his life had been no less than he had expected. Nevertheless, this death had been a long time coming. He had spent four years in the Tower, writing memoirs, as well as penning defences of episcopacy and the liturgy. He might have been left there and forgotten if it had not been necessary for him to appoint bishops at Parliament’s request. When he had refused to appoint an individual who had once been rejected by the king, his enemies in Parliament were reminded that they had unfinished business in his regard.
For Laud, the Church of England was a pillar of a Christian society, which, along with the Crown and a well-established social hierarchy, would protect the weak from the strong. Others saw him as an apologist for tyranny and an enemy of the godly. Popery had been the leading accusation made against Laud at his trial, and he had defended himself from it vigorously. He had ‘laboured nothing more, than that the external worship of God might be preserved’, he told his judges. Puritan neglect of places of worship was a kind of sacrilege while ritual and ceremony were together ‘the hedge that fence the substance of religion from all the indignities which profaneness … too commonly put upon it’. Since the essence of religious ceremonies was that the whole congregation took part, so uniformity of religion in the community had been at the heart of his reforms. Enforcing it had in turn been allied to royal authority.1
It was defiance of royal authority that had cost Laud’s prosecution lawyer, the Puritan polemicist William Prynne, his ears and had branded his face. Defiance of Parliament’s authority was to cost William Laud his life.
As with Strafford, the prosecution had failed to achieve a conviction at trial. Laud had been condemned by Parliament. The Act of Attainder was passed on 4 January 1645: the same day that Parliament abolished the Book of Common Prayer, and with it the old Jacobean and Elizabethan liturgy of the Church of England. Now, six days later, the seventy-one-year-old was being escorted to Tower Hill. The white-haired old man was harangued and harassed by a mob all the way to the scaffold. Even here his tormentors were so numerous that they barred his way to the block.fn1 ‘I did think’, Laud commented drily, ‘that I might have room to die.’ Despite the clamour he met his end ‘supported by remarkable constancy’.2
Charles was certain God would now punish Parliament for their actions. He ascribed his own misfortunes to divine retribution for having agreed to send the innocent Strafford to his death in May 1641. Charles bore no such responsibility for Laud’s beheading. This Act of Attainder had not borne his signature. It was Parliament’s turn to feel divine retribution, Charles assured Henrietta Maria, ‘this last crying blood being totally theirs’.3
Charles now had to win the war outright or be crushed. He confided in Henrietta Maria that there was no longer any realistic prospect of a negotiated peace. The Independents would expect him to sacrifice his religious beliefs, deny his sacramental kingship, and his monopoly of legitimate force. He was equally resolved that he would ‘neither quit episcopacy, nor that sword which God hath given into my hands’.4 To defeat his enemies, however, he had to have Irish troops. He was now prepared to drop the penal laws against Irish Catholics in return for their help, although he drew the line at giving them the right to practise their religion with equal status to Protestants. While negotiations with the Irish continued, those of his councillors who remained strongly opposed to his bringing in foreign troops were sidelined. Several were appointed to a council to advise the fourteen-year-old Prince of Wales. Charles had appointed the prince as leader of the Royalist forces in the west, explaining that ‘himself and the prince were too much to venture in one bottom’, for if they were captured together it would ‘ruin them both’.5 The Independents could make the prince a usurper, just as the infant King James and been made a usurper of his own mother’s throne.
The Prince of Wales and his council duly left Oxford for the west in March. Charles, meanwhile, prepared to go on the attack in the Midlands.
Dawn on 20 May 1645 was heralded in Leicester by the blast of cannon. The besieged townsfolk were firing at the royal army as they built a battery for the king’s heavy guns. Over the last month they had addressed weaknesses in the town’s defences, and fortified Leicester’s crumbling walls. Scottish soldiers as well as local recruits had joined the 900 or so men of military age already in the town. Nevertheless, Leicester remained short of arms and some of the recent recruits were described as ‘being very malignant, with many coming in who did not intend to fight’.6
At one o’clock the king’s cannon fired two great shots at Leicester: a warning of what would come if the Town Committee did not agree surrender terms. The townspeople worked to further strengthen the fortifications while the committee continued to drag out the negotiations for as long as they could. At three o’clock Prince Rupert lost patience and the Royalist battery began to ‘play’ on the town walls. The defenders fought back ferociously with cannon and musket. At six o’clock Royalist cannon breached the wall on the south side of Leicester.7 The townsfolk dug earth frantically and grabbed woolsacks to fill the gap, with the ‘women and children giving the most active and fearless help’. It took six hours to seal the breach and a Royalist assault then began at two other points.
The defenders fought back ‘with great courage and resolution’. ‘We were thrice repulsed,’ Charles admitted to his wife. Nevertheless, at midnight the Royalists broke through the fortifications and poured into the town.8 In the darkness attackers and defenders fought hand to hand and street by street, without quarter given.9 A Royalist commander recalled ‘the very women … did take their parts … they fired upon our men out of their windows, from the tops of houses, and threw tiles upon their heads’. There were bodies lying everywhere when resistance ended at around two in the morning, and Rupert’s black colours were raised above the battery.10 Yet still the killing continued. Captured town councillors were shot or hanged in cold blood. Finally, the plundering began.
Many of the Royalist troops were from the poor, mountainous regions of mid Wales and they robbed Leicester without mercy. Churches, hospitals and homes were all ‘made prey to the enraged and greedy soldier’.11 A resident claimed years later that he saw Charles riding through the town in armour, indifferent to attacks on innocent civilians, declaring, ‘I do not care if they cut them three times more, for they are mine enemies.’ At the time, however, a Parliamentarian newspaper allowed that the civilians had only been killed in the angry confusion of battle, ‘rather than on purpose’.12 What the accusations against Charles truly reflect is the bitter legacy of this siege.
One townsman, William Summers, had lost his house and all his possessions, his son was killed and he saw his wife go mad with grief.13 Just how many others must have been left ruined or grief-stricken is indicated by the 140 cartloads of spoils listed as taken from the town, and the parish registers that reveal 709 burials immediately after the siege. But, however terrible the events in Leicester, at last the end of the war seemed to be in sight. ‘If it shall please God to bless me,’ Charles wrote to Henrietta Maria, ‘it may make us see London this next winter.’14 A few days later, his spirits rose further when he learned good news from Scotland, where Montrose had enjoyed further victories. ‘Since this rebellion my affairs were never in so fair and hopeful a way.’15 It seemed that God had indeed taken up the king’s cause.
Fairfax was ordered by Parliament to avenge Leicester. His army of 14,000 outnumbered Charles’s forces by at least 5,000 men, and Cromwell had again been given command of Fairfax’s cavalry. But the king viewed what Royalists referred to as the ‘New Noddle Army’ with contempt. It was made up from units of the former Parliamentarian armies of the Earl of Essex, the Eastern Association (which had been under the command of the Earl of Manchester) and the Southern Association (formerly under Sir William Waller). In addition there were pressed men from Parliamentarian-held areas. The reforms had cleared out the old leadership, but there were rumours the New Model Army’s morale was poor. The soldier Sir Samuel Luke, writing on 9 June, thought it ‘the bravest for bodies of men, horse and arms, so far as the common soldiers, as ever I saw in my life’: but many of the officers were inexperienced, and he worried that you could barely tell them apart from their men.16
On 14 June 1645, Charles received news that Fairfax’s army had been spotted close to his headquarters in Market Harborough, Leicestershire. With their smaller force, the best chance for the Royalists was to attack early so catching the enemy off guard before sweeping them from the field with maximum ferocity.17 With this in mind Rupert deployed the main body of the Royalist army on Dust Hill, facing the Northamptonshire village of Naseby. The Royalist cavalry was in the wings, infantry in the middle, with a reserve line of two infantry regiments.
The battle began at about 10 a.m., ‘the first charge being given by Prince Rupert, with his own and Prince Maurice’s troop’ – the right wing of the cavalry. They rode ‘with incredible valour and fury’ and routed at least two of the cavalry regiments they confronted.18 They then wheeled round to hit the enemy right wing in the rear – only to find around 3,000 New Model pikemen and musketeers blocking their path. Rupert was trapped and so unable to order up the reserves. Meanwhile, the Royalist cavalry in the left wing was in a struggle against overwhelming odds. They stood their ground although ‘outfronted and outpoured by their assailants’ until ‘still more [Roundheads] came up to their ranks and put them to the rout’.19
Charles, seeing Cromwell’s cavalry riding in pursuit of the broken Royalist left wing, moved to lead a countercharge. It put him in a direct line of fire from Fairfax’s regiment of foot. The Earl of Carnwathfn2 grabbed the bridle of the king’s horse and, swearing several full-blooded Scottish oaths, warned, ‘Will you go upon your death in an instant?’20 With Charles’s horse abruptly pulled up, the entire charge juddered to a halt. Orders were shouted out for the men to turn right. They turned, only to face a vast force of Roundheads. They turned again in panic and fled, galloping hard ‘upon the spur, as if they were every man to shift for himself’.21
With confusion and flight on the right, the Royalist infantry in the middle was inflicting heavy casualties on the New Model Army. Unfortunately, with neither Rupert nor Charles present to give orders, the reserve lines never moved forward. The infantry were worn down by sheer weight of numbers and Cromwell used his cavalry reserves to complete the Royalist defeat.22 The ensign of the last regiment to resist was killed by Fairfax with his own hand.23
Charles and Rupert tried to rally their broken troops, but it was too late. There was not a Royalist left on the battlefield who was not a prisoner or dead by one o’clock that afternoon. Charles had been in the heart of the action and the bodies lay ‘most thick on the hill the king’s men stood on’.24 The remnant of his army was now in flight, the king among them, riding hard towards Leicester. When Charles found his escape blocked by soldiers on the county boundary, he charged his horse across a small brook, dashed through ranks of surprised Roundheads – and got away by the skin of his teeth.
Elsewhere, in a field between Naseby and the village of East Farndon, the 500 or so women who rode with the baggage trains of the Royalist army were less fortunate. Unarmed and on foot, they were being slaughtered.
Between 100 and 400 women were killed at Naseby. The rest were mutilated, their faces cut into ‘the whore’s mask’, noses slit and mouths slashed. This was not part of a general massacre.25 Only these non-combatants – the laundry women, the wives and lovers of the Royalist soldiers – were treated without mercy.
Since the beginning of the civil war Parliament’s pamphleteers had claimed that popish Irish and Welsh whores were following the king’s army in large numbers, that they carried knives and that some were witches.26 The stories about Boy had heightened interest in the occult. Now racism and religious hatred had come together to find full expression. The parliamentary press, reporting on the massacre, observed that the women had had their just deserts. They had ‘cruel countenances’, and were paying for the humiliation of the parliamentary camp followers in Cornwall, who had been robbed of their clothes.
The camp followers at Naseby were not, however, the only women to be murdered in large numbers that summer. Three days later the events of another mass killing would be set in train. Thirty-six people – the vast majority of them women – were tried for witchcraft at the assizes in Essex. They were the weak, the frail, the unconventional, those who had made enemies and had no powerful defenders. Nearly half were in their sixties. Although there was no concerted policy against witches either by Parliament or its leading supporters, the Earl of Warwick, whose interests dominated this area, appears to have done nothing to stop this breakdown in public order. The mob was given its head. Only one of those accused of witchcraft would be found innocent, and eighteen were hanged on one afternoon. In total about a hundred ‘witches’ would die in 1645: more than had died on such charges thus far in the whole of English history.
Meanwhile, on 21 June 1645, a week after Naseby, the captured Royalist soldiers were being paraded through London escorted by the Green and Yellow regiments of the London trained bands. Fairfax had destroyed Charles’s principal field army outside the west. While the king licked his wounds at Raglan Castle in Wales, the New Model Army now marched into the west. On 10 July they defeated the king’s main field army there at the Battle of Langport, south of Bristol. A different kind of blow then followed.
A parliamentary newspaper reported that the capture of the king’s correspondence at Naseby had proved more valuable to Parliament than ‘all the wealth and soldiers that we took’.27 Around 200 letters had been gathered, including many between Charles and Henrietta Maria. Often Charles’s letters to her concerned matters of state, but all were infused with the language of love. She was his ‘Dear Heart’ and he was ‘eternally’ hers. Thirty-seven letters had been carefully chosen for translation and transcription. These were now published, with commentary, under the prurient title The King’s Cabinet Opened. This exposed what was, supposedly, the king’s darkest secret: proof that he, and not his ‘evil councillors’, was responsible for policy, and that he, in turn, was the vassal of a foreign, Catholic wife.
Henrietta Maria was depicted in The King’s Cabinet Opened as a transgender perversion of nature, with the official commentary pointing to shocking examples of her mannishness during the civil war, such as when ‘you see she marcheth at the head of an army and calls herself the Generalissima!’ Those letters from Henrietta Maria in which she wrote of wishing only to serve her husband were excluded from The King’s Cabinet Opened. Those that referred to Charles’s concern about her poor health were carefully edited of such material. The information Charles had been sent regularly from France about his wife’s desperate illness had made him protective.28 His criticisms of her ideas were thus always made obliquely; where he agreed with her he did so ringingly – and such endorsements were underscored in Parliament’s commentary: ‘It is plain’, the commentary ran, ‘that the king’s councils are wholly managed by the queen.’ Particularly damaging for Charles was the material that suggested he might agree to his wife’s wish that he allow his Catholic subjects the free practice of their religion.29 ‘This’, one parliamentary journalist wrote, ‘is the Dear Heart which hath cost him almost three Kingdoms.’ Here was ‘the true controller of the breeches’.
Charles’s public reaction to The King’s Cabinet Opened was less one of embarrassment, however, than of disgust. It was ‘barbarous’ to publish his private letters for public view. They had lost ‘that reputation for civility and humanity which ought to be paid to all men’. He, on the other hand, had lost only his papers. These offered nothing for him to be ashamed of, as good people would judge, for ‘bees gather honey where the spider sucks poison’.30 Royalists concurred, noting that Henrietta Maria had done nothing that did not ‘befit a wife’. It was natural for women to advise their husbands, and as the wife to an English king, and mother to the heir to the English throne, she was, effectively, English. But this was Royalist bravado. There were many more spiders sucking poison from the letters than bees finding honey.31
The success of Parliament’s propaganda, built as it was on deep-rooted gender and religious prejudices, would be long-lasting. Henrietta Maria still remains in much popular memory the hysterical and domineering wife depicted in The King’s Cabinet Opened, and even responsible for the loss of Charles’s kingdoms.
Charles’s leading general, Prince Rupert, accepted that the recent battlefield defeats meant the king could no longer hope to win the war. He advised Charles to begin negotiations for peace. Charles refused, angrily. He was well aware, he told Rupert, that ‘there is no probability but of my ruin’. He would not, however, agree to any terms against ‘the defence of my religion, crown and friends’. He reminded Rupert that ‘as a Christian I must tell you that God will not suffer rebels to prosper, or this cause to be overthrown’.32 He still firmly believed God would grant ultimate victory to his cause, although he accepted this might come after his own death, either in battle or by assassination. ‘It is very fit for me now to prepare for the worst,’ he wrote to his heir. The Prince of Wales now needed to save himself. If it looked as if he was at risk of falling into rebel hands he should flee England for France, Charles advised.33 Later Charles changed his mind, and suggested the prince go to Protestant Denmark instead.
Further military defeats followed like hammer blows. On 10 September 1645 Rupert surrendered Bristol. On 13 September Montrose’s army was defeated in Scotland at the Battle of Philiphaugh. Then, on 14 October, Oliver Cromwell arrived in north Hampshire at the long-besieged Basing House, stronghold of the Catholic Marquess of Winchester, and a leading Royalist fortress.
Cromwell had an army of 7,000 battle-hardened troops. Basing House had 300 defenders, including clergymen and priests, actors and artists, women and children. The seventy-two-year-old Inigo Jones had used his talents as an architect to help plan the defences, and the women had been taking lead from the roof to cast bullets. They called Basing ‘Loyalty House’ and they had carved these words in the windowpanes. Cromwell saw it merely as ‘a nest of Romanists’.34
Cromwell’s first cannon shot killed two of Lady Winchester’s ladies and his troops soon overwhelmed the house. A hundred survivors of the attack were killed on the spot, ‘many whereof in cold blood’.35 ‘You must remember what they were’, a parliamentary newspaper noted: ‘they were most of them papists; therefore our muskets and our swords did show but little compassion’.36 Six of the Catholic priests were murdered with four others kept alive only so they might be drawn and quartered in public executions. But there were not only Catholics here. One Protestant clergyman, who had been severely wounded, saw his daughter’s head split open with a sword after she had abused Cromwell’s men as Roundheads and traitors. Past insults were equally costly. A comedian from Drury Lane, who had mocked Puritans in his routines, was killed by a Roundhead major doing ‘the Lord’s work’.37 Charles had once observed that while dull comedians are condemned, the witty are more hated.38 The comic from Drury Lane had been far too witty for his own good.
When the killing was finished, the house was plundered of its famous riches, and the remaining civilians stripped of anything of value, including their clothes. Warwick’s former protégé, Hugh Peter, now the New Model Army’s chief chaplain and propagandist, saw ‘8 or 9 gentlewomen of rank running forth together’ as they were grabbed at and stripped by the Roundhead soldiers. A fire then began and soon the great palace and its works of art were in flames. Inigo Jones was carried out wrapped in a blanket through billowing smoke as the palace burned. In the cellars, meanwhile, the remnants of the garrison were dying in the flames. Hugh Peter reported hearing their last futile cries for quarter before the nest of Romanists was at last snuffed out.39
The victors of that summer did not represent the whole of the Long Parliament as elected in 1641, or even that part of Parliament that had opposed Charles after 1642. They represented one party, the Independents. They had in their control the New Model Army, which had matured into a disciplined fighting force, and that was, crucially, regularly paid and so less prone to desertions than Essex’s army had been.40 There still remained, however, a very substantial Presbyterian party, not only in Parliament, but also in the City of London, where many people were fearful of ‘the increase of heresies, sects and schisms’ encouraged by the Independents.41 Together with the Scots, the English Presbyterian party, still including Holland, now offered secret peace terms to Charles. They agreed that Charles could keep many of his powers. In return, however, he would have to accept the Covenant. Henrietta Maria urged her husband to accept this offer. Charles ignored her. He would never equivocate on his belief in the divine origins of a Protestant episcopate.
Charles returned to his capital at Oxford, and prepared to play the Presbyterians and the Independents off against each other. It would buy him time and let God do his work.