25

Resurrection

IT WAS JUDGED ‘unsafe and inconvenient’ for Charles to be buried in Westminster Abbey, alongside his parents King James and Anna of Denmark, and the infant children he and Henrietta Maria had lost. In such a public spot his tomb could too easily become a place of pilgrimage.¹ Instead, on 7 February 1649, Charles’s body was sent out of London, ‘without pomp or noise’, on a simple bier drawn by six horses, each trapped in black velvet.² Its destination was the garrisoned castle at Windsor. Charles’s plain coffin rested that night in his former bedchamber. The next day, MPs granted four of his former noble servants permission to oversee his burial in the security of St George’s Chapel: the earls of Lindsey and Southampton, the Marquess of Hertford, and Charles’s cousin, the Duke of Richmond.

Richmond had been made a Gentleman of the Bedchamber when he was only thirteen and had become amongst the most glamorous members of Charles’s court. Van Dyck had painted Richmond many times – twice with his favourite hound, a huge, sharp-faced, elegant dog, gazing up at his master. Dogs symbolise fidelity and Richmond had certainly proved faithful to Charles through all that had brought him here. He had three younger brothers killed in action, and aged only thirty-six he was already in breaking health and destined for an early grave.

The four great peers were allowed to take three servants each and permitted to spend up to £500: a tenth of what had been spent on the funeral of the Parliamentarian general Essex in 1646.³ They arrived at Windsor that afternoon, together with William Juxon. Richmond wore the insignia of the Order of the Garter, St George killing the dragon: that symbol of sin and of rebellion. The chivalric virtues the Order exalted – of a band of brothers bound to each other and their prince under God – had lain at the heart of Charles’s view of kingship. Putting on his own George had been Charles’s first action every morning, and taking it off was the last of his life.

As the men now entered the chapel where the Order was celebrated they saw that the impressive tomb of Charles’s ancestor, Edward IV, lay open.⁴ The vault was easily accessible and it had seemed an appropriate choice of burial spot to the military governor of the castle, Colonel Whitchcote. Parliament’s latest orders were, however, that Charles be buried more anonymously, ‘in H. VIII. his chapel, or the quire there’.⁵

Henry VIII had intended that a great mausoleum be built for him here, but the terror he had evoked had died with him and his orders had been ignored. The popish statues and ironwork destined for his tomb had lain abandoned in the junk room known as his ‘chapel’ for decades. In 1646 they had at last been sold or destroyed. Henry VIII’s body lay instead in an unmarked grave beneath the stone floor between the quire stalls, and the exact spot was long forgotten. The noblemen now helped search for Henry’s lost tomb in the narrow space of the quire, one tapping the ground with a staff, the others stamping with their boots. At last there was a hollow ring. The stones and earth were removed and Richmond stepped down into the gloom.

In the torchlight Richmond saw two coffins near each other, ‘the one very large of antique form, the other little’. It was clear whose they were: Henry VIII and his third queen, Jane Seymour, the mother of his son. Each was covered with velvet cloth, perfectly preserved.⁶

Richmond ordered a girdle of lead be made for Charles’s coffin, engraved ‘KING CHARLES’, along with the year of his death. The sexton was then asked to ensure the chapel was locked for the night.

The following morning, Charles’s coffin was brought down into St George’s Hall in readiness for the internment. There was a delay after it was discovered there had been a break-in at the vault. A soldier from the garrison was found carrying a piece of Henry VIII’s skeleton. He said he had intended to whittle the bone into a handle for a knife.⁷ The war had made plunder a way of life. Even Colonel Whitchcote had taken images connected with the Garter from the chapel.⁸

It was almost three o’clock in the afternoon when Charles’s coffin was at last carried out of the hall. Thomas Herbert recalled a ‘serene and clear day’, the coffin borne by ‘gentlemen that were of quality and in mourning’ and the four peers carrying a black velvet pall.⁹ Behind them Juxon led a short procession of their servants. As they stepped forward, however, it began to snow and the spinning flakes soon ‘fell so fast, as by that time they came to the west end of the royal chapel, the black velvet pall was all white’.¹⁰ The ‘colour of innocence’ was how Herbert later described it, and recalled Charles as ‘the White King’ who, it was said, was crowned in white. The loyal servant of Parliament surely did not believe in Charles’s innocence that day and the snow may be a myth.^fn1 Yet Herbert’s image fills the void where otherwise there is only the slow tramp of men walking. This was not a funeral, merely a burial. Colonel Whitchcote had refused Juxon permission to use the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer, reminding him it was ‘put down’ by Parliament.

No prayers were read as Charles’s mourners gathered in the chapel, and it was in silence that his coffin was lowered into the blackness of the vault.

Two days after Charles was buried, the trial of Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, began. Once a client of the royal favourite George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, Holland had become, as Groom of the Stool, Charles’s closest body servant. Yet he had betrayed Charles to play a leading role in the outbreak of the first civil war. Holland had twice returned to the king’s cause. His last adventure now looked set to cost Holland his life. Aging and ill, Holland stood accused of treason, but he remained as unrepentant of turning coat against Parliament as he had been about his earlier betrayal of the king.

The rebellion Holland had joined against the king in 1642 was a conservative revolt led by the political heirs of his uncle, Elizabeth I’s last favourite, the 2nd Earl of Essex. He insisted his career was marked not by betrayal, but by his loyalty ‘to the public and very particularly to Parliament’. He had hoped they would quickly secure Parliament’s rights in a ‘mixed monarchy’ and the restoration of the Church of England’s Calvinist credentials. It was the cause that had changed. As it became ever more radical it had ‘carried them further than I thought reasonable, and, truly, there I left them’, he admitted. ‘But there is nothing I have said or done or professed … which has not been very constant and clear … to serve the King, Parliament, Religion.’¹¹

On 6 March Holland’s trial concluded in a guilty verdict. His role during the Eleven Years’ Tyranny, when he had raised money for the king through Forest fines, and so aided Charles’s bid to rule without Parliament, and his ‘misstep’ in 1643 when he had deserted Parliament’s cause to join Charles at Oxford, both told against him. So did his breaking of his word not to betray Parliament again, and instead attempting to raise an army in 1648. John Bradshawe, who had pronounced the death sentence on the king, did the same on Holland.

Over the following three days Holland prepared for his death with prayer. Warwick, General Fairfax, his wife and friends pleaded with MPs to grant Holland mercy. His death sentence was, in the end, confirmed by a majority of only one: ‘So his life was lost by that small part of a man’s breath,’ a relative recorded sadly.¹² On 9 March 1649, Holland was escorted to the scaffold outside Westminster Hall in New Palace Yard. He gave his speech explaining his actions, standing in the blood from the beheading earlier that morning of the Scottish commander, the Duke of Hamilton.

Holland, famous for his elegant dress, was ready now to ‘outbrave death’ in a good suit. It was a perk for an executioner to have the right to sell the clothes of the prisoner he had executed. Holland, however, had thought of this. ‘Here, my friend,’ he said to the executioner, handing him a bag of gold, ‘let my clothes and my body alone. There is £10 for thee.¹³ That is better than my clothes I am sure of it.’ He was preparing to lie down on the low block, when he spoke to the executioner again: ‘Friend, do you hear me, if you take up my head do not take off my cap.’ He was about to lose his head. He did not want his head also to lose its hat.

Holland lay flat on the scaffold to position himself on the low block, and shuffled forward and backward on his stomach until he was lying in the exact place the executioner wanted, facing ‘the hall of justice’ where the king had also been convicted. Holland said a prayer and then thrust out his hands as a sign to the axeman. The executioner hesitated. ‘Now! Now!’ Holland cried, and before the final shout was out of his mouth his head fell.¹⁴

The life of Holland’s friend and cousin Lucy Carlisle was, for a time, also at risk. Evidence of her leading involvement in the war of the Engagement had emerged at his trial. Less than a week after Holland’s execution a guard arrived to arrest her at the house of her sister, the Countess of Leicester. She hid in her bedroom, but their commander, the regicide Colonel Thomas Harrison, knew she was in the house and demanded she appear. The arrest warrant was read to her in the hall and she was escorted out. Her sister tried to speak a few words to her but was pushed aside.

Lucy was taken away for cross-examination on suspicion of treason, and on 21 March taken to the Tower where she was kept ‘close prisoner’. Lucy’s many powerful near relatives eventually achieved her release on licence in the summer of 1651. She immediately continued her Royalist plotting, this time for Charles II, who was about to lead an invasion of England.

Unburdened by his father’s passionate belief in the episcopal Church of England Charles II had become (in name) a Presbyterian. His reward had been a coronation in Edinburgh and a Scottish army with which to fight for his English throne. It did him little good. Charles II was defeated at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651, and fled back into exile.

A batch of Lucy’s letters, written to Charles II in 1648 when he was Prince of Wales, was discovered in the royal baggage captured on the battlefield near Worcester. Even more dangerously, a Royalist revealed how Lucy had continued to plot for the Royalist cause. Cromwell, the New Model Army and their allies were busy bringing their opponents to justice, be they conservative Royalists or radical Levellers. But Lucy was seen as yesterday’s rebel. In March 1652 her freedom was confirmed.

A former courtier once saw Lucy during her enforced retirement sitting by herself at the top of Richmond Hill. She was gazing down at the Thames, and it seemed to him she was enjoying herself more than she had ‘in all her former vanities’.¹⁵ It is more likely that she was wistfully recalling these vanities. It was while swimming in the Thames that her friend and occasional rival, Mme de Chevreuse, had drawn crowds in the summer of 1638.¹⁶ Now Chevreuse, like Lucy, was growing old and politically irrelevant. In Paris a satirical ‘Geographical Map’ of Louis XIV’s court described her as ‘a large, already rather ancient fortress’, the exterior appearance still ‘imposing but internally in a sad plight’.¹⁷

Meanwhile, Lucy was a mere onlooker in high politics of the English republic. The monarchy had been abolished in 1649 and the ancient coronation regalia – including the crown of Edward the Confessor, that symbol of a people’s love for their king – were destroyed. Nothing would survive save for the small twelfth-century anointing spoon. But war continued. Ireland and Scotland were reduced to provinces of England under the new Commonwealth. The Scots lost their legal system for a time – and their national dignity. The Irish lost very much more: 25 per cent of the population died from famine and disease and many were sent as slaves to the colonies in the Caribbean, or as indentured labour to New England. Thus were the Catholics of Ireland ‘taught liberty’, as Hugh Peter put it.¹⁸

The long-held ambition of the Puritan and aristocratic colonisers to expand England’s empire in the Americas was also not forgotten. Voyages of conquest were launched and England’s Dutch rivals were defeated in the war of 1652–4. Fairfax had resigned in 1650, after refusing to lead the invasion of Scotland, but Cromwell had assumed the office of Lord Protector in 1653, and became a king in all but name. Mrs Cromwell was called ‘Her Highness’ and their daughters were known as ‘princesses’. Warwick bore the sword of state at Cromwell’s virtual coronation, a regal second inauguration as Protector, on 26 June 1657. The families even intermarried. On 14 November 1657 Cromwell’s daughter, the princess Frances, married Warwick’s heir, Robert Rich.

Warwick died the following spring of 1658. The war against Spain he had always pushed for had, in the end, proved less successful than he had hoped. But his own colonising activities are his legacy. Warwick, Rhode Island, Warwick County and the Warwick river, Virginia, would be just some of the places named after him in what is now the United States. He had been one of the towering figures of the civil war.

Cromwell died in September 1658. Charles I’s sister, the Winter Queen, rejoiced at the death of a man she had referred to as ‘the beast of Revelation’ and to whom she had long wished ‘the like end and speedily’.¹⁹ In France, however, the news brought Charles I’s widow, Henrietta Maria, no happiness. ‘I do not as yet see any great advantage to us,’ she wrote to a friend. The Royalist cause seemed quite defeated, with or without Cromwell. Cromwell’s son Richard succeeded his father in an attempt to mimic the old hereditary system and secure the stability it had offered. Yet if Charles II was incapable of winning back the English crown, the Puritan Commonwealth was nevertheless to fall, leaving behind a lasting distrust in England for political radicalism.

Taxation had proved more arbitrary during the Commonwealth than it had been under Charles I, liberty was more restricted, and Parliament’s privileges were ignored, while the bullying reformation of manners of Puritan piety continued to be detested. Richard had little of his father’s mettle and stepped down as Protector in May 1659. In due course, a new Parliament backed by General Monck, the commander of the army of occupation in Scotland, recalled Charles II. The restored king entered London on his thirtieth birthday, 19 May 1660, to popular rejoicing.

In October 1660 ten of those associated with the regicide of Charles I were tried and executed, with another nineteen imprisoned for life. Amongst the victims was Hugh Peter, who had failed to escape back to New England as other pilgrims had done.^fn2 In the new year, the corpses of Oliver Cromwell and other long-dead regicides would be dug up, beheaded and dismembered like the corpses of the Ruthven brothers in Scotland on the day that Charles was born. Their shrivelled heads make a grim bookend to the king’s story.

Meanwhile, on 2 November 1660, Henrietta Maria returned to London, her barge rowed up the Thames surrounded by a welcoming flotilla of boats. It was a low-key affair compared to her first entry in 1625, when the banks had been lined with cheering crowds. The Catholic queen who had fought so hard for her husband remained a controversial figure. She entered the palace without fanfare by the Privy Stairs and was installed in freshly decorated apartments. Her son also had silk taffetas and velvets in Stuart scarlet delivered from the Great Wardrobe to upholster the carriages she would need, and for new fashionable dresses.²⁰

As the queen dowager prepared to greet old courtiers, Lucy Carlisle was eager to see her former mistress once more. It was to be the first time they had met since 1642, when Henrietta Maria was preparing to flee London with the king and Lucy had failed to persuade them to stay. On 5 November Lucy enjoyed a good dinner at her rented house on the Strand, ordered her sedan chair be brought round to take her to court, and began her toilette. As she was almost ready to leave she took out a new ribbon for her audience with the queen. She never got to wear it. She suffered a massive stroke and died without being able to speak another word.²¹ She was sixty-one.

Henrietta Maria made no recorded comment on the death of her former lady-in-waiting. There were other deaths to preoccupy her as she greeted curious courtiers in the palace where her husband had spent his last hours. She had often told her friends that she did not know how she had ‘survived the blow’ of Charles’s beheading.²² Two of their children had died since then – the watchful Elizabeth, at Carisbrooke Castle in September 1650, aged only fourteen, and Henry aged twenty, of smallpox in September 1660. Their daughter Mary – Lucy Carlisle’s god-daughter – would die in England in December 1660, also of smallpox.

Henrietta Maria disappointed those who first saw her in London now. The diarist Samuel Pepys described her as ‘a very little plain old woman’. She had once been an innovator in the theatre, an arms buyer, and a warrior with a conquering army, yet she had ‘nothing more in her presence in any respect, nor garb than any ordinary woman’. In time, however, that view would change: the scarlet taffeta was made up into new gowns and Henrietta Maria’s formidable charm would shine again. The court of the queen dowager became the most elegant in England and Henrietta Maria amused and entertained with stories of her rivalry with Buckingham, and of the favourite little dog she had once carried under shell-fire. She even declared to her sister Christine that she was, once more, ‘the most contented person in the world’.²³

New pictures replaced some of Charles’s great art collection, which had been dissipated all over Europe, as well as in Britain. Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of St John had been sold for a mere 140 livres – a little over £11 (only £1 more than Holland had given his executioner in lieu of his bloodied suit).^fn3 Cromwell had kept other pictures for himself, and had had a surprising preference for Italian artists, hanging his palaces with some of Charles’s erotic nudes.²⁴ It was not just great men, however, who had acquired Charles’s pictures and other treasures. His ordinary subjects had formed syndicates to invest in his art collection and the Commonwealth had paid debts with art. One syndicate had helped a minor official purchase two paintings by Raphael, while a plumber had ended up with a Titian in part payment of his bill for palace repairs. Indeed, there were small houses across London hanging works painted by Van Dyck, Rubens and Correggio for palaces and princes.²⁵ Some were now returned willingly, some less so: much remains in private collections and museums across the globe.

In September 1662, Pepys saw Henrietta Maria at court once more, sitting with Charles II and his queen as well as his current mistress, Lady Castlemaine, and his bastard son by Lucy Walter, soon to be made the Duke of Monmouth.²⁶ Henrietta Maria was unfazed by the sexual proclivities of kings. Her younger son, James, was also a notorious lover of women. Charles II admired the fact that James’s pursuit of women surpassed even his own dedication to it. The king was ungenerous, however, to the loyal, flame-haired spy Jane Whorwood. She had returned to her violent husband after Charles’s execution, and her brutish spouse had injured her several times. Believing her life was at risk, she had left him and they separated officially, but he never paid her the money the courts had ordered him to, and she lived in poverty until her death in 1684 aged seventy-two.

Henrietta Maria had returned to France for good in the spring of 1665. She wished to be with her youngest child, Henrietta, who had been born while she was on the run during the civil war, and was the only one of her children who had grown up with her. Philip IV of Spain died in September 1665, bequeathing his throne to a son by his second wife and niece, Mariana of Austria. The result of generations of inbreeding, Charles II of Spain was mentally and physically disabled, and incapable of having children. In France, by contrast, Louis XIV was busy creating Europe’s greatest absolute monarchy: France under the Sun King, and not Spain, was to be the great power of the new age.

Louis XIV’s mother, Anne of Austria, had called Charles I’s death ‘a blow which ought to make all kings tremble’. Louis XIV did not forget it and he treated his aunt with great respect. When Henrietta Maria died on 10 September 1669 he paid for a state funeral. Although her reputation today remains tainted by old prejudices, she had been as remarkable as any of the consorts of Henry VIII, whose reputations have been popularly reassessed. The English ambassador sent a delegation to the Louvre to retrieve the last of her goods. They found, tucked away in a cornelian case, a miniature of Charles I. It was the only portrait of him she had kept. It had been painted in 1623, the year she had first seen him in the Louvre; it was a likeness neither of a martyr nor of a murderer, but of a ‘venturous knight’ who still had his dreams to fulfil, and all his great adventures before him.