Notes

Abbreviations

BL	British Library
CSPD	Calendar of State Papers, Domestic
CSPV	Calendar of State Papers relating to Venice
HLRO	House of Lords Record Office
HMC	Historical Manuscripts Commission
MHS	Massachusetts Historical Society
ODNB	Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
PRO	Public Records Office
TNA	The National Archives

Author’s Note

Sir Simonds d’Ewes quoted in Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell, The Murder of King James I (2015), p. 9; David Nichol Smith, Characters from the Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (1918), p. 9.

Preface: Venturous Knight

1 For the best introduction to the Reformation and the Wars of Religion, see Peter Marshall’s The Reformation, A Very Short Introduction (2009), and for the full story of the English Reformation see his Heretics and Believers (2017).

2 The Reform churches had followed the beliefs of Huldrych Zwingli and later of John Calvin.

3 The origins of the term Huguenot is uncertain. They had been behind a generation of civil wars that had culminated in Louis XIII’s Huguenot father, Henri de Bourbon, becoming heir to the French throne. Since Parisians were prepared to fight to the death rather than accept a Protestant king, Henri had converted to Catholicism before he was crowned as Henri IV. ‘Paris is worth a Mass’ were his apocryphal words.

4 In England the Reform Protestantism introduced by Henry VIII’s son, Edward VI, had been swept away on his death by his Catholic half-sister Mary Tudor. If she had had children, rather than the Protestant Elizabeth as her heir, it was highly likely England would have remained Catholic under them.

5 James also feared Jesuit claims made in ‘A Conference on the Next Succession’ (1594/5) that monarchy was essentially elective and that the Tudor monarchy was a clear example of this.

6 Godfrey Goodman’s history of James’s court describes a Privy Council meeting that took place only hours after Elizabeth’s death in 1603. There was a discussion on the wording of the letter the council was to write to James. Cecil produced a note composed by the 2nd Earl of Essex, ‘written to some private friends, that when the time came the King of Scots might be accepted with some conditions’. Those at the meeting who supported a motion to limit the king’s powers were outvoted. For more on this see Leanda de Lisle, After Elizabeth (2005), p. 131.

7 CSPD 12 addenda (407).

8 Julia Pardoe, Life and Memoirs of Marie de’ Medici (1852), Vol. III, p. 218.

9 With around 20 million people, the population of France was almost three times larger than that of England, Scotland and Ireland put together.

10 In 1610 Henri IV had been poised to intervene in a dispute over the succession in two territories within the Holy Roman Empire. Although a Catholic, Henri had been supporting two Protestant candidates against the choices of the Bourbon dynasty’s European rivals, the Habsburgs. His carriage had come to a halt in a narrow Paris street when a tall, red-haired man leapt onto the wheel by his window. The heavy leather curtain had been pulled back and the man reached in and stabbed Henri twice in the chest. The king was dashed back to the Louvre, but was already dead by the time he arrived. ‘What we saw beggars description,’ witnesses reported. ‘The whole court shocked and stunned with grief, standing silent and motionless as statues.’ Henri IV’s widow, Marie de’ Medici, was with Louis, weeping, and nearby his corpse was lying on a bed. The torture and the details of execution of the murderer, François Ravaillac, are too horrible to describe, even in this book, in which there are many horrible deaths. Bibliothèque nationale, Charles de la Roncière, Catalogue des manuscrits de la collection des Cinq-Cents de Colbert (1908), pp. 12ff, 64–96; Oeuvres d’Etienne Pasquier (1723), Vol. II, col. 1063–4.

11 Baron Edward Herbert of Cherbury, The Life of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (2012), p. 37.

12 Letters of King Charles I, ed. Sir Charles Petrie (1935), p. 8.

13 As Queen of England Henriette-Marie would be known for a short time as Henry, and thereafter as Mary.

14 Letters of King Charles I, ed. Petrie, p. 9.

15 Ibid.

16 They had taken rooms at an inn on the rue Saint-Jacques. Today it is a backstreet in the Latin Quarter. Then it was one of the main roads out of Paris. Cherbury, p. 45.

17 CSPV 1619–21 (576).

18 By the end of the century Protestantism would be reduced to a mere fifth of Europe’s land area.

Chapter 1: ‘Dearest Son’

1 Bishop Hackett quoted in Philippe Erlanger, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham (1951), p. 49.

2 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon quoted in David Nichol Smith, Characters from the Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (1918), pp. 12, 13–14, 15.

3 Come the New Year, James rewarded Anna (only he called her Annie) with a fabulous jewel worth 1,333 Scottish pounds; Leanda de Lisle, After Elizabeth (2005), p. 71 and notes.

4 Thanks to Erin Griffey for this reference: Frederick Devon (ed.), Issues of the Exchequer (extracts of the Pell Records, Order Books of James) (1837), p. 10.

5 CSPD 1603–10 (264).

6 Sir Philip Warwick, quoted in Smith, p. 53.

7 Pauline Gregg, Charles I (2000), p. 295.

8 Thanks to Erin Griffey for this reference and information: Devon (ed.), Issues of the Exchequer, p. 48.

9 Carola Oman, The Winter Queen (1938, revd edn 2000), p. 36.

10 Mark Kishlansky, Charles I (2014), p. 12.

11 Nearly thirty years later Charles still had a small bronze pacing horse that Henry had admired and which he had brought him on his deathbed to cheer him up.

12 Oman, p. 63. The ship, the Prince Royal, had been named after Henry, and may be the ship that inspired Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

13 ‘A pattern for a King’s Inaugeration’ in James VI and I: Political Works, ed. J. P. Sommerville (2006), p. 229.

14 Gondomar quoted in Gregg, p. 33.

15 Francis Bacon, Of the Advancement and Proficience of Learning (BL, Humanities, C.46.i.1.), annotation by Charles I; thanks to Sarah Poynting for this reference and transcription.

16 ‘Si vis omnia subicere, te subice rationi’ (a misquotation from Seneca – it should have ‘tibi’ after ‘omnia’). Thanks to Sarah Poynting for this information.

17 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon observed that Charles had ‘a nature inclined to adventures’. Glyn Redworth, The Prince and the Infanta: The Cultural Politics of the Spanish Match (2003), p. 75; for ‘extreme resolutions’ see Dorset to Salisbury [York], 27 June 1642, HMC Hatfield, xxii, 372.

18 William Benchley Rye, England as seen by Foreigners (1865, revd edn 2000), p. 133; Andrew Thrush, http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/periods/stuarts/death-prince-henry-and-succession-crisis-1612-1614.

19 Ronald Lightbown, ‘Charles I and the Art of the Goldsmith’ in Arthur MacGregor (ed.), The Late King’s Goods (1989), pp. 233–55.

20 It is often asserted that Charles spoke with a Scottish accent, although no contemporary comments on it. I discussed this with Sarah Poynting, who is editing a comprehensive book on Charles’s writings. She has found no real evidence that he did, beyond a few traces of Scottish spelling – such as ‘hes’ for ‘has’. I do think, however, that this suggests an occasional and slight Scottish inflection.

21 The first reference to Murray being a whipping boy that I can find dates from long after Charles’s death, in Gilbert Burnet, History of My Own Times (1724/1833), Vol. I, p. 436. Earlier, Thomas Fuller’s Church History (1655) had claimed Barnaby Fitzpatrick was whipping boy to Edward VI. This in turn (it seems to me) was probably influenced by Samuel Rowley’s 1605 play To See Me is to Know Me in which Henry VIII mentions having had a whipping boy. The play was written shortly after James’s tracts on divine right were published in England. I am not aware of any earlier such stories.

22 James dedicated a collection of his writings to Charles in 1616.

23 Eikon Basilike, p. 167; Richard Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (2007), p. 13.

24 John Jewel, quoted in Leanda de Lisle, The Sisters Who Would be Queen (2008), p. 196; Ronald G. Asch, Sacral Kingship Between Disenchantment and Re-Enchantment (2014), p. 65.

25 Mémoires de Madame de Motteville, tr. Katherine Wormeley, Vol. II (1902), p. 84.

26 For the first decade of her reign Elizabeth felt not much less threatened by Protestants than by Catholics, and with good reason. Edward VI’s Privy Councils – who had imposed the first Protestant Prayer Book on England when he was eleven – had treated her poorly. On his death in 1553 his councillors had then backed her exclusion from the succession, along with that of her Catholic half-sister Mary, in favour of her married cousin, Lady Jane Grey/Dudley. Fearful that even now they would prefer a married queen she kept her married Protestant heir, Jane’s sister Katherine Grey/Seymour, imprisoned, and bastardised her children. It was only after Katherine’s death in 1568 that Mary, Queen of Scots, became the greater threat. See de Lisle, Sisters, or relevant chapters in Leanda de Lisle, Tudor: The Family Story (2013).

27 De Lisle, Tudor, p. 356.

28 De Lisle, After Elizabeth, p. 29.

29 It was also key to England’s victory against the papal Antichrist in the war on evil.

30 As Elizabeth had never trusted the nobility, Protestant or Catholic, she had worked hard to nurture the affections of the common sort. Unfortunately her great subjects had learned that they too could appeal to public opinion – a dangerous legacy for her Stuart successors. Essex had been loved as a hero of the war with Spain, and was expert at self-promotion. By contrast his leading rival Robert Cecil, Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, was detested. Elizabeth had always ensured her officials bore the blame for unpopular decisions. The result was that the people blamed Cecil for the failings of her government – and not the queen.

31 The ballads being sung about Essex at court was reported in a contemporary journal; see de Lisle, After Elizabeth, p. 8.

32 Traditionally an English king was expected to live off his own resources. Only in exceptional circumstances would Parliament raise the taxes known as subsidies that the Crown needed to pay their extraordinary expenses. It was a system designed in the Middle Ages and was no longer fit for purpose. Inflation and corruption in both assessment and collection meant Parliament’s subsidies were worth a fraction of what they had been under the Tudors. One had plunged in value from £130,000 at the end of Elizabeth’s reign to £55,000 in the early 1620s, and that is without counting the effects of inflation. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (2003), p. 200.

33 Katie Whitaker, A Royal Passion (2010), p. 28.

34 Clarendon quoted in Smith, pp. 13–14.

35 BL, Add. MS 19368, f. 112.

36 James VI and I: Political Works, ed. Sommerville, p. 230.

37 ‘A pattern for a King’s Inaugeration’ in ibid., p. 249.

38 Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles (2000), p. 151.

Chapter 2: Becoming King

1 The Letters of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, ed. L. M. Baker (1953), p. 54.

2 John Rushworth, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State, Vol. I (1721), p. 40.

3 Specifically there were efforts to prove the legitimacy of William Seymour, Earl of Hertford, the senior grandson of the Tudor princess Lady Katherine Grey. Henry VIII had demoted the Stuart line of his elder sister Margaret in line of succession in order to protect his children from a potentially powerful Stuart rival. In their place he had promoted descendants of his younger sister. In 1554, Mary I executed the senior of these, the so-called nine days’ queen, Lady Jane Grey, for treason. Jane was regarded as a virtual Protestant martyr. The second sister, Katherine, was Elizabeth I’s heir, but Elizabeth saw her as a threat and had refused to recognise her marriage to Hertford’s father. This had made his father a bastard and had ensured the accession of the Stuarts. Early in James’s reign Hertford had attempted to restore his tainted royal blood by marrying James’s cousin, Arbella Stuart, and so uniting the lines of Henry VIII’s two sisters. He was sent to the Tower from where he escaped, while Arbella starved herself to death there in 1615. Hertford had subsequently married the 3rd Earl of Essex’s favourite sister, Frances. The attempts to prove his legitimacy were being made in June 1621 by the 2nd Earl of Essex’s close friend Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton; Henry Ellis (ed.), Original Letters Illustrative of English History, Vol. III (1824), p. 239. In the same year Hertford began building a vast tomb for his grandparents at Salisbury Cathedral, one which advertised Elizabeth I’s unfair treatment of the couple. Hertford also commissioned several large-scale copies of a miniature of Katherine with his father as a baby in the Tower. He kept a picture of his great-aunt, Lady Jane Grey, and of his first wife, Arbella Stuart. (Longleat House, Seymour Papers, Vol. 6, f. 241, will of Frances Seymour, 1674: ‘I do also give and bequeath to my s[ai]d grandaughter [sic] the lady Frances Thynne … my picture of the Lady Arabella my dear Lord’s first wife now hanging in the dining roome, and the picture of the Queen Jane Grey, now hanging in my chamber with another the picture of my Lady Katherine.’ Thanks to Dr Stephan Edwards for this reference.)

4 Francis Bacon, Of the Advancement and Proficience of Learning (BL, Humanities, C.46.i.1.); Loquacity, XXXI, p. 315, Rr2r. Contra. Thanks to Sarah Poynting for this reference and transcription.

5 Sir Simonds d’Ewes quoted in Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell, The Murder of King James I (2015), p. 9.

6 Michael C. Questier (ed.), Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Politics, 1621–1625 (2009), p. 41.

7 Zahira Veliz, ‘Signs of Identity in Lady with a Fan by Diego Velázquez: Costume and Likeness Reconsidered’, Art Bulletin, Vol. 86, No. 1 (March 2004), p. 87.

8 The University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain has calculated what is called the inbreeding coefficient for each individual across sixteen generations of the Habsburgs, using genealogical information for Philip IV’s son Carlos II and 3,000 of his relatives and ancestors. The inbreeding coefficient indicates the likelihood that an individual would receive two identical genes at a given position on a chromosome because of the relatedness of their parents. By the time Philip’s eventual heir, Carlos II, was born (mentally and physically disabled), the inbreeding coefficient had increased considerably down through the generations, from 0.025 for Philip I to 0.254 for Carlos II – almost as high as would be expected for the offspring of a marriage between a parent and child or brother and sister.

9 Jonathan Brown and J. H. Elliott, A Palace for a King (1980), pp. 31, 32.

10 Ibid., p. 41.

11 Rubens to Palamede de Fabri sieur de Valavez, 10 January 1625: Fiona Donovan, Rubens and England (2004), p. 61. I have altered the translation here from ‘the greatest amateur of paintings’ to make more sense to the modern ear; also see Donovan on James and art, p. 86.

12 Bellany and Cogswell, p. 11.

13 John Colin Dunlop (ed.), Memoirs of Spain during the Reign of Philip IV and Charles II, Vol. I, p. 30 (print on demand).

14 Although Buckingham promises having once ‘got hold of your bedpost never to quit it’ he may not have been referring to a sexual relationship, but of his desire to regain physical proximity to the king as the fount of honour, patronage and power. It was not unusual to greet a king by embracing his legs. Nevertheless it is difficult to imagine such letters being written to, say, Henry VIII. Bellany and Cogswell, pp. 12, 13.

15 Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles (2000), p. 84.

16 Ibid., p. 104.

17 Mark Charles Fissel (ed.), War and Government in Britain, 1598–1650 (1991), pp. 111, 112; Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (2013), p. 32

18 The war policy had its opponents. There were MPs and peers who regretted the failure of the Spanish alliance. They saw Spain as a means of containing the growing maritime power of the Dutch and the threat this posed to English commercial interests. Meanwhile the advocates of war differed on how best to achieve their aims. Some wanted to employ a mercenary force to attack Spanish Flanders, so forcing the Habsburgs to divert troops from the Palatinate. Others hoped to see royal support for their privateering and colonising efforts in the Americas.

19 Bellany and Cogswell, p. xxiv.

20 Ibid., p. 219.

21 Ibid., p. 84.

22 CSPD 27 March 1625 (2).

23 Ellis (ed.), Vol. III, p. 244.

Chapter 3: A Marriage Alliance

1 Hackneys were licensed to ply for trade from 1625, with charges regulated by Parliament.

2 CSPV April 1625 (17).

3 Charles’s late mother, Anna, was reputed to have been a Catholic convert. But Anna’s brother was the Lutheran Christian IV of Denmark, not the King of France, and she had also had the tact to die while the Thirty Years War was still in its infancy.

4 Quoted in Mark Kishlansky, Charles I (2014), p. 18.

5 Charles Cotolendi, La Vie de très-haute et très-puissante princesse, Henriette-Marie de France, reyne de la Grande-Bretagne (1690), pp. 10ff; Gesa Stedman, Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth Century France and England (2013), p. 30 and note.

6 Cotolendi, pp. 10ff; Stedman, p. 30 and note; CSPV 1625–6 (61).

7 CSPV 16 May (61); Erin Griffey, On Display (2015), p. 36.

8 A True Discourse of all the Royal Passages, Tryumphs and Ceremonies, observed at the Contract and Mariage of the High and flighty CHARLES, King of Great Britain, and the most Excellentest of Ladies, the Lady HENRIETTA MARIA of Burbon, sister to the most Christian King of FRANCE (1625), p. 8.

9 CSPV 9 May (47).

10 Griffey, p. 52.

11 CSPD 14 May 1625: Charles borrowed money off the Fielding family, for example, and they have kept the receipts for the funeral expenses they paid for.

12 Yet more diamonds glittered at his spurs, his sword, his girdle, his hatband, and he wore with a feather that was all of diamonds. Mémoires de Madame de Motteville, tr. Katherine Wormeley, Vol. I (1886), pp. 31–7; Collection des Mémoires Relatifs a l’histoire de France, ed. A. Petitot (1824), Vol. XXXVI, pp. 342–9; Richelieu, Mémoires, ed. A. Petitot (1823), Vol. V, p. 89.

13 Mémoires de P. de la Porte, eds. Petitot and Monmarque, Series II, Vol. LIX (1817), pp. 297–9.

14 Laura Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (2011), pp. 29, 30.

15 Sir Philip Warwick, Memories of the Reigne of Charles I (1701), p. 14; Charles had shown loyalty to many of his father’s former office holders, confirming them in their former places. This was disappointing for all those who hoped for a shake-up and new preferment.

16 Full name: Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu et de Fronsac. On the garden, see Diary of John Evelyn, 27 February 1644.

17 The gardens were reputed to be amongst the finest in the kingdom.

18 The title Earl of Warwick, first held by their father, had previously been held by the Dudley family. It thus linked the Rich family to the Dudley family’s history: the anti-Spanish stance of the Puritan leader Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who was the 2nd Earl of Essex’s stepfather, and to those Edwardian Protestant reforms spearheaded by Leicester’s father, and which culminated in the radical 1552 prayer book. Most famously, it was previously a Plantagenet title, held by the fifteenth-century Warwick the Kingmaker.

19 Warwick had joined the recently defunct Virginia Company in 1612 and was one of its largest stockholders. He was also a founder member and largest stockholder in the 1614 Somers Island (Bermuda) Company. Further colonial enterprises would follow.

20 Equivalent to a King of England’s Groom of the Stool.

21 For contemporary descriptions of her, see note 36 in Zahira Veliz, ‘Signs of Identity in Lady with a Fan by Diego Velázquez: Costume and Likeness Reconsidered’, Art Bulletin, Vol. 86, No. 1 (March 2004), pp. 75–95; Richelieu, Vol. IV, p. 74.

22 A. Lloyd Moote, Louis XIII (1989), p. 193.

23 Some observers believed that Buckingham’s attentions exceeded what was decent, and, it is said, infuriated Louis when he heard about them.

24 Convents and monasteries were as popular as, and often performed a similar function to, modern ‘mindfulness’ and other therapy retreats for such things as anxiety.

25 CSPV 1625–6 (92).

26 See Griffey, Appendix I, pp. 40–1.

27 Katie Whitaker, A Royal Passion (2010), p. 51, note 36.

28 CSPV 1625–6 (153).

29 Griffey, pp. 40–1.

30 Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (1857), p. 9.

31 Griffey, p. 40.

32 CSPV 1625–6 (117); Gordon Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome (1935), p. 77 and note 2.

33 Letters of King Charles I, ed. Sir Charles Petrie (1935), p. 239. Shorter and longer versions of this letter exist – and may have been given to the queen at the same time. The shorter, with minor variations, survives in two manuscripts in the Parisian Archives nationales under the title ‘Instruction de la Reine Marie de Medicis’. The longer version of the letter, which may contain additions by Cardinal de Bérulle, is in the Bibliothèque nationale de France under the title ‘Instructions données par Marie de Medicis ä sa fille Henriette de France, Reyne d’Angleterre’. I have quoted from the longer version. For the further details on these letters (and more), see Karen Britland’s brilliant PhD thesis for the University of Leeds, ‘Neoplatonic identities: Literary Representation and the politics of Henrietta Maria’s Court Circle’ (2000), esp. pp. 41, 42.

34 Mémoires de Madame de Motteville, Vol. II (1902), p. 86.

35 CSPD 9 June 1625.

Chapter 4: ‘Under the Eyes of Christendom’

1 Karen Britland, ‘Neoplatonic identities: Literary Representation and the politics of Henrietta Maria’s Court Circle’, PhD thesis, University of Leeds (2000), pp. 43, 44. This is my own loose translation of an anonymous tract purporting to have been written by the queen on her leaving France, dated 1625.

2 Celia Fiennes, http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/fiennes/saddle/saddle.html.

3 Henrietta Maria suffered from scoliosis – a curvature of the spine that reduced her height; Dominic Pearce, Henrietta Maria (2015), p. 40.

4 Thomas Birch, The Court and Times of Charles I (1849), Vol. I, p. 30.

5 Basilikon Doron in James VI and I: Political Works, ed. J. P. Sommerville (2006), p. 42.

6 Mme de Chevreuse was heavily pregnant and when she gave birth to a daughter in July, before her return to France, Charles would play godfather to her baby girl.

7 BL, Add. MS 72331, No. 174, Wooley (17 June 1625); Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell, The Murder of King James I (2015), p. 198.

8 CSPD 25 June (91); Birch, p. 35.

9 Originally a Spanish three-metre dance, and considered quite erotic. The French court developed a slow version.

10 Thoinot Arbeau in 1599.

11 Karen Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (2006), p. 15; in fact Henrietta Maria would not conceive for several years, and aged fifteen she may still have lacked the physical maturity to do so.

12 David Scott, Leviathan: The Rise of Britain as a World Power (2013), p. 108.

13 James Larkin, Stuart Royal Proclamations (1983), p. 34.

14 Birch, p. 31.

15 Ibid., p. 30.

16 The Duc de Saint-Simon is the Frenchman in question, date 1698. Although many biographies of Henrietta Maria state that she spent the night at Denmark House I can find no contemporary reference for this. Several mention Whitehall; see Birch, pp. 31, 33; ‘Whitehall Palace: Buildings’ in Montagu H. Cox and Philip Norman (eds.), Survey of London: Volume 13, St Margaret, Westminster, Part II: Whitehall I (1930), pp. 41–115, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol13/pt2/pp41.

17 Leanda de Lisle, After Elizabeth (2005), p. 265.

18 Kevin Sharpe, ‘The Image of Virtue: The Court and Household of Charles I, 1625–42’ in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (1994), p. 244; John Adamson, ‘The Tudor and Stuart Courts’ in John Adamson (ed.), The Princely Courts of Europe (1999), p. 112.

19 CSPV 1625–6 (25).

20 The Speeches of the Lord Digby in the High Court of Parliament (1641), p. 24 (BL, E196/6, 7).

21 Tim Harris, Rebellion: Britain’s First Stuart Kings (2014), p. 25, quoting Derek Hirst, The Representative of the People? (2005), pp. 104–5.

22 Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles (2000), p. 105.

23 Chris Kyle, Theatre of State (2012), pp. 109–10; tapestries purchased by Henry VIII celebrated the peace Romulus and Remus brought to Rome after civil war; quotations from Journal of the House of Lords, Vol. III.

24 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon quoted in David Nichol Smith, Characters from the Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (1918), p. 161.

25 Scott, Leviathan, p. 157.

26 This land edged into the neighbouring counties of Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (2003), p. 262.

27 The old merchants also included the Merchant Adventurers who had traditionally controlled the cloth trade to Germany and the Low Countries. The Levant and East India Companies traded with southern Europe, the Mediterranean and the Near and Far East. These companies were used to working hand in glove with the king. They paid taxes, negotiated with the Crown directly to the monarch, outside Parliament’s control, and in exchange were granted privileged access to trade and a limited membership.

28 The Americas required risky investments in production that the great merchant companies did not wish to make. The new merchants were involved in tobacco and later sugar, pioneering the Africa, West Indies, Virginia and New England trades in slaves, crops and provisions. Brenner, pp. 685–6; by ‘godly’ they meant the elect, predestined by God to enter heaven.

29 It was said that as a schoolboy at Eton, Robin had fallen out of bed just as the axe fell on his father’s head, crying out ‘his father was killed … his father was dead’. The Devereux titles and estates had reverted to the Crown until James’s accession in 1603. Then, as the heir to James’s ‘martyr’, he went from zero – having neither titles nor estates – to hero of the new Stuart age. Unfortunately James later arranged a disastrous marriage for Essex with the wicked Frances Howard, daughter of a favoured councillor. Essex had been scarred by smallpox and his bride found him repulsive, cuckolded him, then tried to poison him. When that failed, she had their marriage annulled on grounds of his impotence. She later successfully poisoned a knight who had threatened her plans to marry her lover, Robert Carr, Buckingham’s predecessor as royal favourite. For more on this amazing case see Anne Somerset, Unnatural Murder: Poison in the Court of James I (1998).

30 Scott, Leviathan, p. 129.

31 CSPV 1625–6 (138).

32 Charles Creighton, A History of Epidemics in Britain, Vol. I (1891), p. 513.

33 Malcolm Smuts, ‘Political Thought in Early Stuart Britain’ in Barry Coward (ed.), A Companion to Stuart Britain (2003), p. 283.

34 Scott, England’s Troubles, p. 108.

35 Even those who supported the war often had different priorities from Charles. For the king it was a dynastic imperative: his sister was his heir, and the Palatinate the inheritance of her eldest son, who could one day be King of England and Scotland. Others saw the restoration of the Palatinate in terms of a Protestant crusade, and Charles could not appeal to this sentiment without alienating potential Catholic allies in Europe.

36 Scott, England’s Troubles, p. 97.

37 Birch, p. 33.

38 A diamond signet made for her in 1628 that was a gift from Charles bears the monogram HM (an M scored through with an H). She certainly never viewed herself as Mary!

39 The poet John Donne.

40 Sir Simonds d’Ewes, Autobiography and Correspondence, Vol. I (1845), p. 272.

41 Birch, p. 40.

42 Walter Devereux: Letters of the Earl of Essex, Vol. III (1853), p. 296.

43 Taylor, the water poet, commented in verse that ‘to be thought a Londoner is worse, than one that breaks [into] a house, or steals a purse’. Creighton, p. 518.

44 Christian IV avowed religious motives, but he also hoped to expand his territories at Habsburg expense.

45 Letters of King Charles I, ed. Sir Charles Petrie (1935), p. 43; Henrietta Maria’s almoner, the Bishop of Mende, the head of her religious household, had heard that Buckingham hoped to improve his reputation by having her household expelled and renewing Catholic persecution.

46 Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray (1888), Vol. I, p. 48. This would have seemed no idle threat. Of the four queens executed under the Tudors, three had enjoyed strong French connections. Anne Boleyn had been a lady-in-waiting at the French court, before she went on to marry, and then fatally to anger, Henry VIII. Lady Jane Grey, who was executed when she was only a year older than Henrietta Maria, had been allied to France against the pro-Spanish Mary Tudor. Mary, Queen of Scots, was half French and a widow of a King of France, where she was remembered as little short of a martyr, hounded to her death by Elizabeth’s Protestant servants.

47 The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, Volume I: 1603–1631, ed. Nadine Akkerman (2015), p. 574, note 6.

48 Fiona Donovan, Rubens and England (2004), p. 17, Rubens to Palamede de Fabri sieur de Valavez, 26 December 1625.

49 Quoted in Bellany and Cogswell, p. 198.

50 Clarendon, Vol. I, p. 49.

51 Malcolm Smuts, ‘Force, Love and Authority in Caroline Political Culture’ in Ian Atherton and Julie Sanders (eds.), The 1630s: Interdisciplinary Essays on Culture and Politics in the Caroline Era (2006), p. 39.

52 Donovan, p. 17, Rubens to Valavez, 26 December 1625.

Chapter 5: Enter Lucy Carlisle

1 Just as Charles had been absent for the Mass following their proxy wedding so, once again, their religious differences were being emphasised. She had also refused to attend the Garter and Bath ceremonies. Also see Louis XIII’s view in CSPV 1625–6 (454).

2 William Lilly, A Prophecy of the White King and Dreadful Dead Man Explained, quoted in Jerome Friedman, The Battle of the Frogs and Fairford’s Flies: Miracles and the Pulp Press During the English Revolution (1993), p. 73.

3 The Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simonds d’Ewes, openlibrary.org, p. 176, https://archive.org/stream/autobio-graphyan01hallgoog#page/n192/mode/2up

4 For a detailed discussion and description of James’s coronation see Leanda de Lisle, After Elizabeth (2005), pp. 261–8.

5 Calvinists believed that Christ had died only for elect souls predestined to heaven before the beginning of time. Arminius had argued against this that it was possible to fall from God’s grace by committing sins. This infuriated Calvinists, who thought it too close to the Catholic belief in free will – that what we choose to do in this life (good or evil) affects where you go in the next (heaven or hell).

6 Psalm 96.

7 Their pamphlet had a ring of truth. Buckingham had motive and means to kill James. Furthermore, it would not have been the first poisoning to have taken place at James’s court. Another of James’s favourites, a man called Robert Carr, had been convicted, along with his wife, Essex’s former spouse Frances Howard, of killing a man with poison. See Anne Somerset, Unnatural Murder: Poison in the Court of James I (1998).

8 Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell, The Murder of King James I (2015), p. 225.

9 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon quoted in David Nichol Smith, Characters from the Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (1918), p. 1323.

10 Pym was to act as one of Warwick’s trustees when he mortgaged his estate in September. He had also supported a proposal in the Commons by Warwick’s kinsman Nathaniel Rich that the war be privatised, with a private navy based in Bermuda, paid for by private subscribers, which would deny Spain the wealth of the West Indies by attacking their shipping. This fleet would not have been liable to the usual taxes and the Council of War would, in effect, have run Charles’s foreign policy in the interests of a group of political gentry and nobles. It proved too radical to go further, however, and the more important matter of Buckingham’s impeachment now took priority; Christopher Thompson, ‘The Origins of the Politics of the Parliamentary Middle Group, 1625–1629’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 22 (1972), p 80.

11 William Cobbett, Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials (1809–26), eds. Thomas Bayly Howell et al., Vol. II, p. 1324 (Impeachment of Buckingham, 1626).

12 Bellany and Cogswell, p. 238.

13 Letters of King Charles I, ed. Sir Charles Petrie (1935), pp. 42–5.

14 Bishop of Mende to Cardinal Richelieu, 24 July, quoted in Sara J. Wolfson, ‘The Female Bedchamber of Queen Henrietta Maria’ in Nadine Akkerman and Birgit Houben (eds.), The Politics of Female Households: 4 (Rulers & Elites) (2013), p. 318.

15 Anne Boleyn’s eyes, it was said, ‘could read the secrets of a man’s heart’; Leanda de Lisle, The Sisters Who Would be Queen (2008), p. 9 and note 16; Raymond A. Anselment, ‘The Countess of Carlisle and Caroline Praise: Convention and Reality’, Studies in Philology, Vol. 82, No. 2 (Spring 1985), p. 215.

16 Julie Sanders, ‘Caroline Salon Culture and Female Agency: The Countess of Carlisle, Henrietta Maria, and Public Theatre’, Theatre Journal, Vol. 52, No. 4 (Women/History, December 2000), pp. 449–64.

17 Wolfson, p. 317.

18 CSPV 1626 (680).

19 Letters of King Charles I, ed. Petrie, p. 45.

20 CSPV 1626 (712).

21 I have included these transcripts in the hope they may be useful to scholars who do not have access to the originals and I have left them untranslated to avoid passing on errors, as far as I can. Belvoir MSS QZ/6/12/1626 (date added in a different hand): ‘Monsieur demande je de robe se tant que je peu pour vous escrire sen me tant come prisonniere que je ne peut pas parle a personne ny se tans descrire mes malheurs ny de me p[re]taundre seullement au non de dieu ay espetie dune pauure prinssese audessos poir et faite quelque chose a mon mal je suis la plus affligee du monde parles a ta Royne mamere de moy et lyuy montres mes maleurs je vous Aisa dieu et a tous mes pauures offisiers et a mon amie st gorge a la contesse de tilare [?] et tous fammes et filles qui ne mou blie pas je ne les oublieres pas aussy il sontes quelque remede a mon mal ou je me noeurs je ne puis je adieu cruel adieu qui me fera morir si dieu na pitie de moy au pere sauues [?] qui prie dieu pour moy et ammie que je tenus tousjours.’ My translation is modernised and altered for sense. There is a transcript of this letter in the rare Alfred Morrison, Catalogue of the Collection of Autograph Letters etc., (1885), Vol. II.

22 Comte de Tillierès, Mémoires (1863), p. 135.

23 James was given five camels by the King of Spain in 1623. Perhaps they had been described to Elizabeth as looking like Carlisle, or perhaps she had seen a camel in the royal menagerie before 1613, or somewhere elsewhere in Europe since.

24 Victor Tapie, France in the Age of Louis XIII and Richelieu (1984), p. 180.

25 ODNB, Charles I.

26 See Appendix, ‘Lucy Carlisle as Milady de Winter’.

27 Clarendon quoted in David Nichol Smith, Characters from the Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (1918), p. 165.

28 Michael P. Winship, ‘Godly Republicanism and the Origins of the Massachusetts Polity’, William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 63, No. 3 (July 2006), p. 440.

29 Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (2003), p. 226.

30 TNA SP 16/75; Wolfson, p. 321.

31 Smith, p. 14.

32 Henry VIII sent his friend Henry Norris to the scaffold simply to help him get rid of an inconvenient wife and in a manner that appealed to his narcissism (Norris was cast as Lancelot to his King Arthur). Elizabeth I was a master at passing the blame for her unpopular decisions on to her servants. The case of William Davidson, who she claimed (untruthfully) had delivered the warrant for the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, without her permission, is the most notorious example.

33 CSPV 1626–8 (542).

Chapter 6: Exit Buckingham

1 Proceedings in Parliament 1628, Vol. 2, p. 58.

2 Ibid., p. 8.

3 Indeed, it would not be until 1789.

4 Quoted in Blair Worden, The English Civil Wars (2009), p. 19. Five per cent of the members of the Commons had refused the loan; Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (2003), p. 226.

5 Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles (2000), p. 111, quoting Sir Robert Phelips; R. C. Johnson and M. J. Cole (eds.), Commons Debates 1628 (1977), p. 40.

6 Robert Lockyer (ed.), The Trial of Charles I: A Contemporary Account Taken from the Memoirs of Sir Thomas Herbert and John Rushworth (1974), p. 439.

7 Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell, The Murder of King James I (2015), p. 326.

8 Acts of the Privy Council, Vol. 43 (1617–28), pp. 492, 505.

9 CSPV 1628 (738).

10 Three versions of the portrait were dispatched in May, June and October to recipients who were probably determined by the queen: Madame Nourrice (or ‘nurse’, Françoise de Monbodiac, the first of the queen’s original French Catholic chamberers), the Duchess of Saxony, and Charles’s sister Elizabeth, the ‘Winter Queen’ of Bohemia. Thank you to Erin Griffey for this information.

11 Erin Griffey, On Display (2015), pp. 80, 81.

12 Unbound letter, Belvoir: ‘La Reine dAngleterre a la Reine sa mere 53 1628 [number and date added in a different hand] Madame je nay voulu lesser partir garnier desy sans assurer vostre Maieste de mon tres humble seruise lors que mr de beaulieu estoit ysy yl me dit que vostre maiest [?] desiroit auoir mon pourtraict mes yl ne foit pas fait asses tost pour qui lenportasse maintenant que sette aucation sest presantee je dit a garnier qui le danit a mr de beaulieu pour le presantir a uostre Majeste je null jamais puisse [?] entreprandre a luy envoyer sans le commandemant que jaue reseu de sa part estant sy tard que jay honte que lon le voye mis vostre Majeste ny pranderapas parte ny a labillemantque le pentre asy malfait que jesupliray vostre Majeste de le fere la beler elle le regarde seullemant commes tres humble seruante qui nauiltre pasy on aumon de que salle que vous lastentes toute sa vie comme elle est Madame Vostre tres humble et tres obeisante fille et seruante Henriette Marie’. Garnier was her lady-in-waiting Françoise de Monbodiac, who was an ally of Buckingham, while Mr Beaulieu was an English courtier. This letter has a partial translation (which I have not used) in Alfred Morrison, Catalogue of the Collection of Autograph Letters etc. (1885), Vol II. Another possible example of Henrietta Maria’s dissatisfaction with an artist who had not done justice to her clothes comes ten years later. Cornelius Johnson corroborated with the artist Gerard Hoockgeest on a full-length miniature of Henrietta Maria, depicted strumming a mandolin with a spaniel playing at her feet (displayed at the Weiss Gallery, London, in 2016). Johnson was particularly talented at painting clothes but even the wonderful movement he gives her dress in this miniature, and the shine of the silk, did not impress the queen. A catalogue compiled by the surveyor of the king’s pictures in 1639 describes the dress as unfinished, and it was dumped in store.

13 CSPD 1628–9 (267–81). The knife that killed Buckingham is today in the keeping of his sister’s senior heir, Alexander Fielding, 12th Earl of Denbigh.

14 Unbound letter, Belvoir, dated 23 August 1628 by reference to the death of Buckingham: ‘je nay peu rettenir du four je suplie vostre Majeste de croyre que je fait tout se qui esttoit en mon pouuoir a cause que vostre Majeste me lauoit commande et que je desire de luy obeir en tout de puis ma lettre escrite mr le duc de Bukingham et mort je croy que vostre Majeste le saura aues non pas comme yl a estte tue avec un couteau aumilieu de lieux sans hommes et est tumbe otit mort sans dire rien du tout que je suis mort et lhomme qui la fait dit toujours quil a fort bien fait yl est ariue ysy vn abe quy est fransois sest le plus mechant homme de la terre des choses quil dit et des aranques quil escrit yl serante de auoir fait les aferes sous mr le cardinal mes yl en est malcontant a ce mis est amuse de seu il est venu ysy. A la Royne Madame ma mere.’ There is a transcript/description in Alfred Morrison, Catalogue of the Collection of Autograph Letters etc. (1885), Vol. II.

15 Unbound letter, Belvoir, from Queen Marie of France: ‘30 aoust 1628 Mon cousin Je uous en uoye una lettre que ma fille la Rayne d’anglesttere ma escreite pour mo[n]strer au Roy uous uerres en que estat ella est et en que missez’ ella c’troue [?] digne de compassion Roxane uous dire des nouelles plus particvlieres estant le derniere quil a [?], e c’que l’on croine’ a c’bien desebellas [?] Vous bai seres les mains au Roy de ma pearle et que ce le prie de ne concerne c’bones graces, et a uous mon cousin ie uous prie de croyre que uous n’aues persone qui soit plus que moy Vostre affectionne cousina Marie de Tours le trentieme aoust [in left-hand margin, written sideways] La contess’ de la Hoye et morte La Rayne desire Madame de Leuen’ pour dame d’Honor et pour dame d atour la Mony a luy ay dict que pour la mony le Roy nonli accuselera iamais.’

16 Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray (1888), Vol. I, p. 37.

17 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon quoted in David Nichol Smith, Characters from the Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (1918), pp. 14, 15, 16.

18 TNA: PRO SP 16/116 f. 4.

19 CSPD 22 November (34); CSPV 21 (603).

20 On 24 August he asked for the constableship of Windsor or the keepership of Hampton Court; CSPD 1628–9 (267).

21 Scott, pp. 110, 111.

22 Malcolm Smuts, ‘Force, Love and Authority in Caroline Political Culture’ in Ian Atherton and Julie Sanders (eds.), The 1630s: Interdisciplinary Essays on Culture and Politics in the Caroline Era (2006), p. 37.

23 Communion tables had stood altar-wise in the royal chapels since the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, and at Whitehall the table had also been railed in by the end of James’s reign. This was not done, however, in the parishes. The Communion-table issue was significant because altars are what Jews – and Romans – used for a sacrifice. They were central to the Catholic worship because, in the Mass, at the moment of consecration Christ’s death – his sacrifice – becomes present. The bread and wine are adored as Christ’s body and blood, a belief Calvinists judge idolatrous.

24 The Puritan in question was Peter Smart, who would be fined for his comments.

25 They included other great nobles such as the Earl of Warwick, Viscount Saye and Sele, his son-in-law, the Earl of Lincoln, and the twenty-one-year-old Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, but also lesser gentry from East Anglia and the West Country, lowly London citizens and radical ministers; Brenner, pp. 169, 272.

26 Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006), p. 92.

27 TNA: PRO, SP 16/106/55 quoted in ODNB.

28 Richard Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (2007), pp. 117, 118.

29 Letters of King Charles I, ed. Sir Charles Petrie (1935), pp. 76, 78.

Chapter 7: ‘Happy in the Lap of Peace’

1 Thomas Birch, The Court and Times of Charles I (1849), Vol. I, p. 356.

2 This letter was found in a folder at Belvoir, marked by the 9th Duke of Rutland ‘Sell’. Henrietta Maria, 1629, to Cardinal Richelieu: ‘Mon cousin je reseus si viuement les obligations que je vous et toujours vne et selle que je sois maintenent de la part que vous prenes en lafliction qui mest ariuee que je croyois esttre ingrate sy je ne vous ren Remersiois par le sieur danery vous assurant que vous nobligeres jamais personne qui en toutes amations vous temoygnera avec plus daffection que moy quelle est Vostre affectionee cousine Henriette Marie’. NB in this rushed letter she omits the ‘R’ to her signature.

3 Belvoir MSS QZ/6 f. 7.

4 CSPV 1630 (366); Carolyn Harris, Queenship and Revolution (2016), pp. 128–9.

5 Belvoir MSS QZ/6/8. King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria to the Queen of France on the birth of Prince Charles, 29 May 1630: ‘Madame La joye que j’ay, joint avec le haste de vous mander bien promtement de l’heureuxe acouchement de ma famme, ne me permett, que de vous dire, que Dieu mercie, la Mere & le fils se portent fort bien, remettant le reste a ce Porteur Mr Montague j’espere que vostre joye pour ces nouvelles ne serest plus indubitable, que vostre confience en moy que je suis Madame Vostre tresaffectionne fils et serviteur Charles R Ma femme pour vous monstré qu’elle se port bien a voulu que je escrive ce ci au son nom, affin que sa main vous tesmoinge cest verite V[ost]re tres humble et tres obeisante fille et servante Henriette Marie’. The translation in the text is modernised. A facsimile of this letter is reproduced in Alfred Morrison, Catalogue of the Collection of Autograph Letters etc. (1885), Vol. I.

6 Thomas Dekker, Seven Deadly Sins of London (1606), pp. 24–9; Charles’s brother-in-law, Frederick, and Louis XIII were named as godparents, as was Marie de’ Medici.

7 Letter to Madame St George: Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (1857), pp. 14, 15.

8 John Adamson, ‘Policy and Pomegranates: Art, Iconography, and Counsel in Rubens’ Anglo-Spanish Diplomacy of 1629–30’ in Luc Duerloo and Malcolm Smuts (eds.), The Age of Rubens: Diplomacy, Dynastic Politics and the Visual Arts in Seventeenth-Century Europe (2016), p. 2.

9 Sara J. Wolfson, ‘The Female Bedchamber of Queen Henrietta Maria’ in Nadine Akkerman and Birgit Houben (eds.), The Politics of Female Households: 4 (Rulers & Elites) (2013), p. 323.

10 Fiona Donovan, Rubens and England (2004), p. 1.

11 Jonathan Brown and J. H. Elliott, A Palace for a King (1980), p. 49.

12 Donovan, p. 1.

13 Adamson, p. 37.

14 In the vulnerable – the old, or teenage boys – a woman’s sexual needs could even lead to death for their male victims. The fifteen-year-old Arthur Tudor, the first husband of England’s last Catholic queen consort, Katherine of Aragon, was supposed to have died of exhaustion responding to his wife’s sexual demands. Henry VIII’s sister, Mary Tudor, was also said to have inadvertently killed the aged Louis XII of France by the same means.

15 Raymond A. Anselment, ‘The Countess of Carlisle and Caroline Praise: Convention and Reality’, Studies in Philology, Vol. 82, No. 2 (Spring 1985), p. 218.

16 CSPV 1629–32 (209), (337); Sara J. Wolfson, ‘The Female Bedchamber of Queen Henrietta Maria’ in Nadine Akkerman and Birgit Houben (eds.), The Politics of Female Households: 4 (Rulers & Elites) (2013), p. 327.

17 HMC 45: Buccleuch Vol. III, p. 347.

18 This was enough to fund the Dutch army in its war with Spain for much of the following year, 1629; Adamson, p. 45.

19 Ibid., p. 57.

20 ‘A golden lion on a red field’, the Latin text of the grant to Rubens proclaimed, ‘taken from our own royal armorial bearings’; ibid., p. 58.

21 In 1631.

22 Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles (2000), p. 100.

23 BL, Add. MS 4181.

24 This is from a chronicle composed by Magdeburg mayor Otto Guericke (1602–86). A census in February 1632 found only 449 citizens left in the rubble of the destroyed city.

25 A sixteenth-century alchemist’s text had predicted a lion – or hero – would ‘proceed from midnight’ – that is the north – to ‘pursue the eagle’, the symbol of the Habsburgs, ‘and after some time overcome it’. For this text see Theophrastus Paracelsus (1493–1541), Magischer Propheceyung vnnd Beschreibung, von Entdeckung der 3. Schätzen Theophrasti Paracelsi (1549), printed as a supplement by Johan Nordström, Lejonet från Norden. Samlaren. Tidskrift för svensk litteraturhistorisk forskning N. F. 15 (1934), pp. 37–9.

26 Carola Oman, The Winter Queen (1938, revd edn 2000), p. 82; Birch, pp. 225–8.

27 The Letters of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, ed. L. M. Baker (1953), pp. 86–8; Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, ed. Green, pp. 301, 302.

28 Letter to Sir Thomas Roe, quoted in Oman, p. 329.

29 The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, Volume II: 1632–1642, ed. Nadine Akkerman (2011), p. 3.

30 Quoted in David Scott, Leviathan: The Rise of Britain as a World Power (2013), p. 146; in October 1633 Charles had all references to his sister and her children deleted from the Book of Common Prayer’s ‘collect’ or prayer for the royal family.

31 John Adamson, ‘Chivalry and Political Culture in Caroline England’ in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (1994), pp. 170–1.

Chapter 8: The Return of Madame de Chevreuse

1 Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006), p. 67.

2 HMC, Lord de L’Isle and Dudley MSS, Vol. VI, p. 94.

3 Julie Sanders, ‘Caroline Salon Culture and Female Agency: The Countess of Carlisle, Henrietta Maria, and Public Theatre’, Theatre Journal, Vol. 52, No. 4, Women/History (December 2000), pp. 454, 456, 463.

4 HMC, Lord de L’Isle and Dudley MSS, Vol. VI, p. 94.

5 Barbara Donagan, ‘A Courtier’s Progress: Greed and Consistency in the Life of the Earl of Holland’, Historical Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2 (June 1976), p. 328.

6 Wentworth would later be made the Earl of Strafford by Charles.

7 HMC, Lord de L’Isle and Dudley MSS, Vol. VI, pp. 67, 94.

8 Sanders, p. 455.

9 William Prynne, On the Unloveliness of Lovelocks (1628).

10 Quoted in John Adamson, ‘Chivalry and Political Culture in Caroline England’ in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (1994), p. 174; see also Richard Cust, ‘Charles I and the Order of the Garter’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 52, No. 2 (2013), p. 353.

11 CSPV October 1637 (329).

12 Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (1857), pp. 15, 16.

13 TNA PRO 31/9/7B.

14 Cust, ‘Charles I and the Order of the Garter’, p. 343.

15 James Callow, The Making of James II (2000), pp. 33, 34.

16 Quoted in Richard Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (2007), p. 149.

17 Robin Blake, Anthony Van Dyck (1999), p. 325; one such apron, which survives in private ownership, is embroidered with blackwork figures of men gardening. It belongs to the heirs of a former Master of the Royal Wardrobe.

18 Eleanor, Countess of Sussex, quoted in ibid., p. 331.

19 The physician and naturalist Martin Lister complained how the ladies of the court ‘were mighty fond of being painted in dishabille’, and this ‘cut out of business the best English painter of his time, Cornelius Johnson’.

20 Gregorio Panzini quoted in Fiona Donovan, Rubens and England (2004), p. 53.

21 PRO C82/2096 f. 28.

22 Not until the nineteenth century did it appear as it does today, clad in dull grey-white Portland stone.

23 In 1638 Van Dyck was also preparing an oil sketch for a series of tapestries depicting the history and ceremonial of the Order of the Garter, that would hang on the walls of the Banqueting House.

24 The customs duties known as ‘impositions’, the collection of which the Crown had long claimed as a prerogative right, had netted £70,000 a year in the first decade of the century. Now impositions raised £218,000; Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (2003), pp. 282, 241.

25 He was a member of the Saybrook Company that was establishing a settlement in what is now Connecticut. The origins of this company lay in a grant of land made by Warwick in 1632 to Viscount Saye and Sele, and Lord Brooke, as well as to John Hampden, John Pym and others. Brooke’s brother-in-law Sir Arthur Hesilrige, who was also later involved in the Connecticut settlement, would be a key figure in the later opposition of Charles.

26 Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (2013), p. 331.

27 CSPV October 1637 (329).

28 Ibid.

29 Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray (1888), Vol. I, pp. 129–32, 196; Sir Philip Warwick, Memories of the Reigne of Charles I (1701), pp. 78–82; Sir Bulstrode Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs etc. (1853), Vol. I, p. 99.

30 John Winthrop first used the phrase in a sermon in 1630.

31 Laura Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (2011), p. 37.

32 Sir Philip Warwick quoted in David Nichol Smith, Characters from the Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (1918), p. 56.

33 CSPV October 1637 (329).

34 David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637– 49 (2004), p. 16.

35 As far as Richelieu was concerned fighting the Habsburgs in alliance with Protestants abroad and tolerating the heretic Huguenots at home, were entirely compatible with his master being ‘the first born son of the [Catholic] Church’. For Richelieu, Louis’ status as an anointed king meant that his enemies were God’s enemies. He also suppressed any Catholic movement whose objective was spiritual renewal independent of royal authority. King James would have approved. Ronald G. Asch, Sacral Kingship Between Disenchantment and Re-Enchantment (2014), pp. 76, 79.

36 Charles had seemingly come close to a French alliance, but that had faded by the summer of 1637, with the king fearful of Dunkirk falling into French hands if the Spanish Netherlands were fatally weakened; Caroline M. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (1983), p. 75.

37 Zahira Veliz, ‘Signs of Identity in Lady with a Fan by Diego Velázquez: Costume and Likeness Reconsidered’, Art Bulletin, Vol. 86, No. 1 (March 2004), p. 91, figure 19 and note 101.

38 CSPV 1636–9 (432).

39 CSPV 1636–9 (438).

40 ‘Upon Madam Chevereuze swimming over the Thames’

I was calm, and yet the Thames touch’d heaven to day,

The water did find out the Milky way,

When Madam Chevereuze by swimming down,

Did the faire Thames the Queen of Rivers crown.

The humble Willows on the shore grew proud

To see her in their shade her body shroud;

And meeting her the Swan (wont to presume)

Bow’d to her whiter neck his sullyed Plume …

Bright Chevereuze the whole difference ends,

Adding so great a treasure to the waves,

As the whole earth seemes useless, but for graves.

(Musarum Delicice: OR The MUSES RECREATION, 1656).

41 Ben Jonson’s Expostulation with Inigo Jones.

42 Earl of Strafford, Letters and Dispatches (1739), Vol. II, p. 194; this is dated May 1638.

43 Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles (2000), p. 117.

44 CSPV 1636–9 (447).

45 William Laud, Works (1847–60), Vol. VII, pp. 452–3, Vol. VI, pp. 379–80, Vol. IV, p. 114.

Chapter 9: ‘A Thing Most Horrible’

1 CSPV 1636–9 (528).

2 A. Lloyd Moote, Louis XIII, The Just (1989), p. 27; her accent is indicated by her spelling.

3 Thomas Birch, The Court and Times of Charles I (1849), Vol. II, p. 343.

4 CSPV 1636–9 (534).

5 TNA SO 3/12 November 1638.

6 Charles observed in the Eikon Basilike that the ‘greatest fault’ men later found with the English prayer book was that ‘it taught them to pray so oft for me’.

7 The dukes of Venice (doges) could not even open foreign dispatches without officials standing over them; John Rushworth, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State, Vol. II (1721), p. 83; Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (2013), p. 335; David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637–49 (2004), pp. 15–19.

8 An Allegory of Marriage, in Honour of Alfonso d’Avalos, Marchese del Vasto. Van Dyck had used the same symbol in a portrait of the Countess of Southampton. For more on this picture see Michael Jaffé, ‘Van Dyck Studies II: La belle & vertueuse Huguenotte’, Burlington Magazine, Vol. 126, No. 979 (October 1984), pp. 602–9, 611.

9 Interestingly the current Earl of Denbigh, whose family had a large collection of Van Dycks commissioned from the artist, still owns one of these ‘studio’ paintings of Charles in armour with his hand on a transparent sphere.

10 Sir Henry Slingsby, Diary (1836), p. 10.

11 Gilbert Burnet, The memoires of the lives and actions of James and William, dukes of Hamilton and Castleherald (1677), p. 55.

12 Christopher Thompson, ‘Centre, Colony and Country: The Second Earl of Warwick and the “Double Crisis” of Politics in Early Stuart England’, unpublished thesis, pp. 47, 48; BL, Egerton MS 2648, ff.1r–2r. See The Winthrop Papers, 7 vols (1928–47), Vol. III, ed. Stewart Mitchell (1943), p. 230. Cf. Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father (2003), pp. 232–8.

13 Malcolm Smuts, ‘Religion, European Politics and Henrietta Maria’s Circle 1625–41’ in Erin Griffey (ed.), Henrietta Maria: Piety, Politics, Patronage (2008), p. 31.

14 Charles and Henrietta Maria commissioned a commemorative volume of elegies and verse; Carolyn Harris, Queenship and Revolution (2016), p. 128.

15 Slingsby, p. 11.

16 Ibid., p. 30.

17 Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006), p. 84; Parker, p. 336.

18 Sarah Poynting, ‘The King’s Correspondence during the Personal Rule in the 1630s’ in Ian Atherton and Julie Sanders (eds.), The 1630s: Interdisciplinary Essays on Culture and Politics in the Caroline Era (2006), p. 87.

19 Had he beaten the Scots in 1639 Charles’s future and that of his kingdoms would have been looking very different. There would have been no second Bishops’ War to fight, and no pressing need to recall Parliament. The Thirty Years War had reached its climax. In 1640 Spain would be undermined by rebellion and, as the future of Protestantism in Europe looked brighter, so Puritan zeal might have withered. No wonder Warwick and other oppositionists had been preparing the ground for emigration to Massachusetts. For more on this see John Adamson, ‘England Without Cromwell’ in Niall Ferguson (ed.), Virtual History (1997).

20 Karen Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (2006), pp. 178–86; Purkiss, pp. 163–4.

21 Wentworth was also made Lord Lieutenant of Ireland to enable to him to govern the country through a deputy while he was absent; ODNB.

22 David Nichol Smith, Characters from the Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (1918), quoting Sir Philip Warwick, p. 66; Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray (1888), Vol. I, pp. 197, 341–2. A stooped neck is caused by trapezius muscles being in constant tension.

23 Malcolm Smuts, ‘Force, Love and Authority in Caroline Political Culture’ in Ian Atherton and Julie Sanders (eds.), The 1630s: Interdisciplinary Essays on Culture and Politics in the Caroline Era (2006), p. 31.

24 Ibid., p. 32.

25 Warwick quoted in Smith, p. 66; Clarendon, Vol. I, pp. 197, 341–2.

26 John Forster, Eminent British Statesmen (1836), Vol. II, p. 352.

27 Her late husband had bequeathed her a wine customs grant in Ireland.

28 HMC, Lord de L’Isle and Dudley MSS, Vol. VI, p. 157; John Adamson, ‘Policy and Pomegranates: Art, Iconography, and Counsel in Rubens’ Anglo-Spanish Diplomacy of 1629–30’ in Luc Duerloo and Malcolm Smuts (eds.), The Age of Rubens: Diplomacy, Dynastic Politics and the Visual Arts in Seventeenth-Century Europe (2016), p. 18.

29 Chevreuse was also busy at this time plotting another Huguenot revolt in La Rochelle; J. H. Elliott, ‘The Year of the Three Ambassadors’ in Hugh Lloyd Jones, Valerie Pearl and Blair Worden (eds.), History and Imagination (1981), p. 169; R. M. Smuts, ‘The Puritan Followers of Henrietta Maria in the 1630s’, English Historical Review, Vol. 93, No. 366 (January 1978), p. 42.

30 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon quoted in Smith, p. 133.

31 Brian Manning, ‘The Aristocracy and the Downfall of Charles I’ in Brian Manning (ed.), Politics, Religion and the English Civil War (1973), p. 40. Northumberland was born at Essex House and was currently acting Lord Admiral.

32 John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (2007), p. 18.

33 D. Gardiner (ed.), The Oxinden Letters 1607–42 (1933), p. 173; the bishops effectively linked his sacral kingship to their own claims to holding a divinely ordained office.

34 CSPV 1640–2 (64). A crown was worth five shillings, and was equivalent to a Venetian ducat.

35 CSPV 1640–2 (69).

36 Ibid.

37 CSPV 10 January 1642 (318). The term ‘mob’ from the Latin ‘mobile vulgus’ would be invented to describe scenes that became all too familiar in London.

38 CSPD XVI (152–6).

39 Warwick quoted in Smith, p. 61.

40 Adamson, p. 31.

41 There is an MS held by the Surrey history centre listing seventeen, LM/1331/50. Those mentioned in CSPD have twelve different names, though Warwick etc. are in both CSPD August 1640 (16) and (19).

42 His wife Frances – Essex’s favourite sister – had just had herself painted by Van Dyck wearing the lock of her father’s hair cut off at his execution in 1601 – a symbol of royal injustice.

Chapter 10: ‘A Broken Glass’

1 John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (2007), pp. 89–90.

2 Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (2003), p. 369.

3 Adamson, p. 82.

4 Caroline M. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (1983), p. 166; CSPV 1640–2 (126).

5 David Scott, Leviathan: The Rise of Britain as a World Power (2013), p. 156; BL, Add. MS 70002, f. 313.

6 Adamson, p. 62 and notes.

7 Sarah Poynting, ‘The King’s Correspondence During the Personal Rule in the 1630s’ in Ian Atherton and Julie Sanders (eds.), The 1630s: Interdisciplinary Essays on Culture and Politics in the Caroline Era (2006), p. 81.

8 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon quoted in David Nichol Smith, Characters from the Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (1918), p. 133.

9 Hibbard, p. 174.

10 Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006), pp. 106, 107. The Puritan colonies in New England would similarly use branding to mark out those who had committed particular kinds of sin. The use of the scarlet letter ‘A’ branded on adulterers was immortalised in the nineteenth-century novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

11 Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of England (1863), Vol. IX, p. 199.

12 CSPD Charles I, XVI (278).

13 Mémoires de Madame de Motteville, tr. Katherine Wormeley, Vol. I (1886), pp. 196, 197; Adamson, pp. 110, 113.

14 HMC, Lord de L’Isle and Dudley MSS, Vol. VI, p. 343: Strafford was placed in the Tower on 25 November.

15 CSPV 1640–2 (131).

16 CSPV 1640–2 (140).

17 CSPV 1640–2 (138).

18 Belvoir MSS QZ/22/1: ‘La Reine d Angleterre Feur. 1641 Monsieur de chauigny ayant envoye fester a mon cousin le cardinal de richelieu pour luy faire entan dre lestat presant ou je suis et luy demander son assistance: jay cru que mayant temoygne toujours beaucoup daffection comme vous aues fait en tout ce qui me conserne: que maintenant vous massisteries dans me afaires ou il y va de [xxx] [xxx] ma ruine entierre ou de mon bien etre comme les affaires iront maintenant quy je natans que … quasy sans resource et fautre je lespere par lassistance du Roy mon frere: je ne vous ay pas escrit quant sorter est alle car jay me suis misse entierremant a suiure les ordres que mon dit Cousin ordonneroit quoy que … ordonne forter de [xxx] desirer de luy que vous pensies estre de sette affaire: vous ayant toujours recongnu sy [xxx] prompt a mobliger que jay eru que dans sette afaire [xxx] vous ne me refuseries pas vostre asistance et que vous garderies le secret qui est tres necesaire je vous prie done de le faire et de croyre que je [xxx] suis sy recongnoisante dessangs que vous mains despe temoynges de vostre affection que je chercheray les moyens de vous faire paroistre que je suis Vostre bien bonne amie Henriette Marie R.’ It was tempting to date this letter to February 1642 – the year beginning 24 March – especially as she was then about to flee England, but as other letters of hers date the year from January I have placed it in 1641. She is writing to Léon Bouthillier, Comte de Chavigny.

19 Leanda de Lisle, After Elizabeth (2005), p. 264.

20 David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637– 49 (2004), pp. 25–9; Brenner, p. 319.

21 The best book on this year – and which is a very exciting read – is John Adamson’s The Noble Revolt. For more of the divisions at this time see pp. 158–63.

22 Re-establishing an Elizabethan-style mixed monarchy and church was all very well for the landed classes. The aristocracy and gentry dominated church patronage, access to Parliament, the county commissions and militias. For the ordinary Londoner it was a different matter. They had had no such access to power and they wanted to have it.

23 Brenner, pp. 324, 329, 331.

24 The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, Volume II: 1632–1642, ed. Nadine Akkerman (2011), p. 946.

Chapter 11: Strafford on Trial

1 CSPV 1640–2 (168).

2 John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (2007), pp. 216, 223, 224.

3 John H. Timmis, Thine is the Kingdom (1974), pp. 64, 65; Adamson, pp. 221, 222, 225.

4 Adamson, pp. 224–5.

5 HMC, Lord de L’Isle and Dudley MSS, Vol. VI, p. 374.

6 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon quoted in David Nichol Smith, Characters from the Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (1918), p. 134.

7 John Rushworth, The Trial of Thomas, Earl of Strafford (1680), pp. 658–9.

8 HMC Various, Vol. II, p. 261; C. V. Wedgwood, Thomas Wentworth (1961), p. 153.

9 Clarendon quoted in Smith, p. 134.

10 The English officers in the north had complained bitterly of being forced to live off the people, ‘contrary to our dispositions, and the quality of our former lives’. They sent notice that ‘we are very sensible the honour of our nation was unfortunately foiled’ in their action against the Scots and warned, ‘we hope so to manage what is left that, if the perverse endeavours of some do not cross us, our future proceedings shall neither deserve the world’s blame nor reproach’. HLRO Main Papers 20/3/41 ff. 78–82.

11 Timmis, pp. 126, 127.

12 A Leicestershire MP and a member of the Saybrook Company; Christopher Thompson, ‘Centre, Colony and Country: The Second Earl of Warwick and the “Double Crisis” of Politics in Early Stuart England’, unpublished thesis, p. 47.

13 Surprisingly Stapilton had a Catholic wife. He would fight for Parliament in the civil war, but was a moderate.

14 Richard Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (2007), pp. 282, 283.

15 Viscount Kells to Sir Thomas Aston, 20 March 1641; BL, Add. MS 36914, f. 199.

16 Letters of King Charles I, ed. Sir Charles Petrie (1935), p. 115.

17 She also asks for the cardinal’s good offices in caring for one of Charles’s Catholic servants who had fled to France. Holland claimed there were only two court Catholics she wished to protect – and specifically excluded a man called Wat Montagu, a son of the Earl of Manchester who had been working on expanding a list of exemptions to the order that all priests leave England by 7 April, on pain of arrest; Caroline M. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (1983), p. 191. One of the lost letters from the Belvoir archives reveals her true opinion, however. In her letter to Richelieu, she recommends the bearer for his ‘merit and his loyalty … in his service to my Lord the King’. He had ‘been in France at the time of my marriage’ (as Montagu had) and was now ‘forced to leave to flee the storm that is falling upon the poor Catholics of this land’. Belvoir MSS QZ/6 f. 16 1641: ‘Mon cousin seluy que vous randra sette lettre estant constraint de sen aler pour fuir lorage qui tombe sur les pauures catoliques de se peis je ne luy ay peu refuser de le vous recomman der car son merite et sa fidellite quil a fait paroistre au seruise du Roy monseigneur me ont conuiee sest pour je vous prie de le vouloir fauoriser et reseuoir de bon oeill comme une personne qui veritablemant se merite: je croy quil vous ait sy bien congnu ayant estte en france au tamps de mon mariage et fort affectione a la france qui sela ne nuira pas a ma recommandation: puis que vous obligeres une personne en le ferant qui est et sera toujours veritablemant Mon cousin Vostre bien affectionnee cousine Henriette Marie R.’ Endorsed: ‘A Mon Cousin Monsieur le Cardinal de Richelieu’.

18 Mémoires de Madame de Motteville, tr. Katherine Wormeley, Vol. I (1886), pp. 196, 197.

19 Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray (1888), Vol. I, p. 320.

20 Adamson, pp. 249–52.

21 For this and other comments see Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (1976), pp. 91–2.

22 Gilbert Burnet, The memoires of the lives and actions of James and William, dukes of Hamilton and Castleherald (1677), pp. 232–3.

23 CSPV 1640–2 (181).

24 John Rushworth, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State, Vol. 8 (1721), p. 166; Vernon F. Snow, Essex the Rebel (1970), p. 263.

25 Dorset to Salisbury, [York] 27 June 1642, HMC Hatfield, XXII, 372.

Chapter 12: Given Up

1 John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (2007), p. 283.

2 Under one of Suckling’s officers, a former man of affairs to Wentworth, called Captain William Billingsley.

3 John Aubrey, Brief Lives (1999), p. 289. He invented cribbage.

4 ‘There was not among our princes a greater courtier of the people than Richard III, not so much out of fear as out of wisdom. And shall the worst of our kings have strive for that and shall not the best?’ he observed; The Works of Sir John Suckling, ed. A. Hamilton Thompson (1910), pp. 322–4; Brian Manning, ‘The Aristocracy and the Downfall of Charles I’ in Brian Manning (ed.), Politics, Religion and the English Civil War (1973), p. 54.

5 The countess also had the care of the five-year-old Princess Elizabeth, and their baby brother, Henry.

6 CSPV 1640–2, 17 January 1641.

7 Journal of the House of Commons, Vol. II, p. 143.

8 CSPV 1640–2 (181).

9 Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006), p. 197; Lettres de Henriette-Marie de France, reine d’Angleterre, à sa soeur Christine, duchesse de Savoie, Vol. V, ed. Hermann Ferrero (1881), p. 57.

10 Ceremonies of Charles I: The Notebooks of John Finet, 1628–1641, ed. Albert J. Loomie (1988), pp. 311–13.

11 It was not his first visit. He had been to England twice previously: the first time in 1635, aged almost eighteen, when he had lived a life of idle fun at court, even siring an illegitimate child.

12 One of Charles’s unpublished letters at Belvoir dating from 8 May 1638 to his sister Elizabeth concerns a possible Swedish match for Charles Louis, and another, unnamed bride for the younger brother ‘Robert’ – better known as Rupert of the Rhine. Belvoir MSS reference QZ/6/9: ‘Charles the First to the Queen of Bohemia, 8 May 1638. My onlie deare Sister I shall onlie name those things that I haue intrusted this bearer with (his haste requyring shortnes, & his fidelitie meriting trust) First concerning the liquidation of accounts betweene me & the King of Denmarke: then concerning a Mache with Swed[en], but of this littell hope: lastlie, of a Mache for your Sone Robert: If he say anie thing else in my name; I shall desyer you to trust, to his honnestie, & not to my memorie: & so I rest Your louing Brother to serue you Charles R. Whythall the 8 of May 1638.’

13 CSPV 1640–2 (188).

14 HMC, Lord de L’Isle and Dudley MSS, Vol. VI, p. 403.

15 Purkiss, p. 193; Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer, Archives ou Correspondance Inédite de la Maison d’Orange Nassau (1857), Vol. III, pp. 460, 463.

16 Behind this measure lay the power of London’s radical citizen opposition – a group very closely associated with the Warwick circle. They had persuaded moderate MPs that Parliament’s financial creditors had to have a guarantee Charles could not dissolve Parliament before its debts were paid; Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (2003), p. 341.

17 The opposition were ‘far too nimble for the king in printing’, loyalists admitted, as he failed to respond in kind, leaving ‘the common people [to] believe the first story which makes impression in their mind’; David Scott, Leviathan: The Rise of Britain as a World Power (2013), p. 158.

18 Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray (1888), Vol. I, p. 337.

19 Ibid.

20 CSPV 1640–2 (188).

21 Clarendon, Vol. I, p. 338.

22 The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, Volume II: 1632–1642, ed. Nadine Akkerman (2011), p. 957.

23 Ibid.

24 Peter Heylyn quoted in John Milton, Observations Upon the Articles of Peace (1649), p. 95.

25 Journal of the House of Lords, Vol. IV, p. 245.

26 Eikon Basilike, p. 9.

Chapter 13: ‘That Sea of Blood’

1 Fynes Moryson quoted in Leanda de Lisle, After Elizabeth (2005), p. 45.

2 The Treaty of London.

3 Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (2003), p. 354.

4 Eikon Basilike, p. 48.

5 Caroline M. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (1983), p. 198.

6 Having fallen ‘from the highest degree of happiness’, she said, ‘into unimaginable misery’; Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006), p. 198; Lettres de Henriette-Marie de France, reine d’Angleterre, à sa soeur Christine, duchesse de Savoie, Vol. V, ed. Hermann Ferrero (1881), p. 57.

7 Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (1857), p. 40.

8 Ibid., p. 32.

9 Charles Carlton, Charles I: The Personal Monarch (1995), p. 223.

10 Thomas Carte, The Life of James, Duke of Ormonde (6 vols., 1851), Vol. V, p. 281.

11 Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (2013), pp. 349–51.

12 Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006), p. 138.

13 Mark Charles Fissel (ed.), War and Government in Britain, 1598– 1650 (1991), p. 243.

14 Sir Philip Warwick, Memories of the Reigne of Charles I (1701), p. 225.

15 Malcolm Smuts, ‘Force, Love and Authority in Caroline Political Culture’ in Ian Atherton and Julie Sanders (eds.), The 1630s: Interdisciplinary Essays on Culture and Politics in the Caroline Era (2006), p. 42; Alnwick MS 15 28v, 29.

16 Samuel Rawson Gardiner, The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1628–1660 (1889/1979), pp. 206–7; Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles (2000), p. 147.

17 CSPV 1640–2 (279) (284).

18 CSPV 1640–2 (279).

19 In 1554, facing the Wyatt revolt, Mary had given a speech in London assuring her subjects she was a mother to them. It had helped her defeat the rebel army. In 1601, Elizabeth’s many similar speeches had helped ensure the people’s loyalty to her during the Essex revolt.

20 Charles had by now reached Ware in Hertfordshire where he did a walkabout amongst the people in the market square and the gentry kissed his hand.

21 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon quoted in Tim Harris, Rebellion: Britain’s First Stuart Kings (2014), p. 440.

22 Speech by Sir Edward Dering, 22 November 1641.

23 CSPV 1640–1 (296).

24 John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (2007), p. 445 and notes.

25 Twenty-two per cent of England’s printed output at this time was dedicated to such atrocity stories.

26 Harris, p. 439.

27 Belvoir MSS QZ/22/5. Another letter, written by a Royalist, complains that papers from Ireland brought by the Irish councillor Thomas, Lord Dillon, for the king, were confiscated in Ware before Charles’s arrival there, and handed to the Junto; Belvoir MSS QZ/22/6. Back in London, meanwhile, the Junto propaganda paid off on 21 December when the Common Council elections to the lower house of the governing body of the City saw a swing towards the Puritan interest. This gained the Junto the City’s 8,000-strong militia.

28 CSPD 1641–3 (185–221).

29 The remaining two were placed in the custody of Black Rod; Adamson, p. 484.

30 Richard Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (2007), p. 320.

31 Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, ed. Green, p. 71.

32 Mémoires de Madame de Motteville, tr. Katherine Wormeley, Vol. I (1886), p. 207.

33 Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of England (1863), Vol. X, p. 136.

34 It is assumed that Lucy sent her message to Pym, but the MP’s name is not certain. William Cobbett, Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials (1809–26), eds. Thomas Bayly Howell et al., Vol. IV, pp. 89–90.

35 Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray (1888), Vol. I, p. 483.

36 Adamson, pp. 495–7.

37 Clarendon, Vol. I, pp. 496–7; Scott, p. 148.

38 Clarendon, Vol. I, p. 434.

39 Eikon Basilike, p. 26.

40 Ibid., pp. 15, 21.

41 Clarendon, Vol. I, p. 507.

Chapter 14: ‘Give Caesar His Due’

1 CSPV 1642–3 (8); Thomas Birch, The Court and Times of Charles I (1849), Vol. II, p. 349.

2 CSPV 1642–3 (8); Birch, p. 349.

3 Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (1857), p. 72.

4 CSPV 1642–3 (8); Birch, p. 349.

5 CSPV 1640–2 (344).

6 Henry Ellis (ed.), Original Letters Illustrative of English History, Vol. IV (1825), p. 2.

7 Peter Heylyn, The Works of Charles I etc. (2010), p. 58.

8 Ellis (ed.), Vol. IV, p. 2.

9 The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, Volume II: 1632–1642, ed. Nadine Akkerman (2011), p. 1033.

10 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon quoted in David Nichol Smith, Characters from the Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (1918), p. 51.

11 Eikon Basilike.

12 Heylyn, p. 60. The word used to describe his tone of voice here is ‘asseveration’.

13 From the so-called prophecy of the ‘Dreadful Dead Man’: a prince in white who becomes ‘lost in the eye of the world … and in the love and affections of his people’: William Lilly, A Prophecy of the White King and Dreadful Dead Man Explained, quoted in Jerome Friedman, The Battle of the Frogs and Fairford’s Flies: Miracles and the Pulp Press During the English Revolution (1993), p. 73.

14 Thomas Knyvett quoted in David Cressy, Charles I and the People of England (2015), p. 292.

15 A silk dress belonging to one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting (probably the Countess of Roxburghe) was one of the most notable items recovered recently from the rediscovered wreck.

16 Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006), p. 213.

17 Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Vol. II, ed. Akkerman, p. 1032.

18 Ibid., p. 1031.

19 Journal of the House of Commons, Vol. II, p. 619.

20 Many of the queen’s letters in the Belvoir archives from this period appear in Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, ed. Green, but this one does not. Belvoir MSS QZ/22/8A: ‘Ma cher coeur jestois sy hastee a vous en voyer heron pour vous dire de ne pas demeurer a aler a hull et de vous donner quelque raisons de la nessesite quil y auat pour cela que je nus pas loysire de vous proposer quel que chose en cas que vous le manquasies ayant de puis releu vostre lettre sur ce subject ray veu que vous en estties en doute et donnies iassy vostre magazin comme perdu: ce que en passant yl fault que je vous dire a estte une tres grande faulte de auoir ofert a la voir et et ne pas poursuiure car vous aues donne tamps au parlement de envoyer leurs ordres et de faire ce quils voudront pour enpecher que vous ne layes yl ne fault jamais faire les choses a demi et sest ce que vous aues toujours fait bien commance et mal ailane [?] mais lafaire est faite yl nia plus rien a dire la desus mais en cas que uostre magasin soit perd u yl fault sonner [very faint, uncertain reading] a ce que tout a afayre et se resou dre a un chemin recourir et le suiure mais mieux que bien nafait son dernier car sy vous lusies suiui esex oroit la gabiolle asette heure voysy la sec onde foy u manquee garde la troy si esme: je crois quil est a propos de enuoyer a vostre oncle pour dusecours car sy vos mu nitions sont parties vous naues plus de quoy faire la guere et yl est tres euidant que sans cela vous nores pas ce que bien doit auoir sest pour quoy yl fault songer aux moyens pour recouuri de toute ses choses et pour sette effect yl fault sasister de nos amis vostre oncle est le plus propre ayant une armee et point de guerre sest pour quoy sil vous plaist de manuoyer une le tre pour luy yl seullemant decroyance a celuy qui luy donnera carlile trouuera quelcun ou elle est a enuoyer et aussy je acheteray de la poudre et munotions et canons ysy et je ne fais nul doute que vous ores de abandant et nauires pour transport er et ofisiers pour seruir sy vous voules: yl nia que a ce mestre entra in: sy esex a ses munitions de la gabiolle son affaire est faite sy vous naues pas yl fault pouruoir car abulament yl fault uenir a un coup et puis que vous trouues les peuples en prenes shier afection nes yl ne faut point perdre de tamps et toujours vous assurer de la gabi olle pour vostre retrayte en cas de nes esite et auoir un regimant des gar des aupres de tout et deux conpagnies de caualerie autremant bien nest pas en seurete ny personne de seux qui sont au pres de tout car quant paris voudra yl les ost era ou par force ou par craint yl nia que a commances assurement esex trouuera beaucoup de personnes affectionnes: touchant vostre onc le je croy que ce que celuy qui yra doit dire est de sauoir sy yl veut assi ster tout de caualeriee et des nau ires pour les transporter cela est tout comme je crois sur sette affaire sy yl vous plaist aussy de manuoyer un warrant soubs vostre main ou vous me donnies un plain pouuoir de engager mes pierreries a cause que les marchants disent que une famme ne peut uandre ses pierre ries durant la uie de son mary despeches de man voyer ses deux choses la que je vous demande jatans de vos nouuelles auec grande impasiance afin de voir ce quil fault faire je escris a holand me longe lettre vous la veres adieu mon cher coeur je suis sylasse que je naie puis plus ce 4/14 may.’ Addressed: ‘Au Roy Monseigneur’; endorsed in the king’s hand: ‘My Wyfe 4 May 1642’, in another hand: ‘From the Queene. 4 May 1642’.

21 BL, Harl. MSS 7379, f. 86; this one is published in Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, ed. Green, p. 64.

22 Belvoir MSS QZ/22/30: ‘The Queen of England La Hage. 8 Sept. 1642 Monsieur de chauigny ayant seu par le jantilhomme que jay envoye au Roy monsieur mon frere: les temoy gnages que vous luy aues donnees de vostre affection en vers moy jay voulu vous en remercier et en mesme tamps vous demander en demander en core des preuues sur une affaire la quelle est sy importante pour le Roy monseigneur et par consequant pour moy [xxx] et sy juste que je ne doute point de reseuoir la satisfaction que je y puis desirer sest que les rebelles dangletaire soubs le nom de seux du parlement ont en voye ysy un agent de leur part et au nom du Royaume dengletaire pour desirer ses estats de se joindre auec eux pour la conseruation de la religion protestante comme yl pretande et pour la ruine de la q catolique disant que le Roy monseigneur et moy sauons voulu restablir et mesme se sont seruis du nom de mon cousin le cardinal de richelieu pour leur temoynge comme monteque vous fera en tandre plus au long qui est me … que je tiens tres faulce et alaquelle je na porte nul croyance: jantans que yls ont dispeche aussy en france assurement unitera pas sur le mesme pretexte de religion: mais sur quel quil soit jespere que yl ne sera pas escouste nil reseu venant de la part du personnes rebelles a dieu et a leur roy : et qui ont estte desilarees telle: je ne laise pourtant de demander vostre assistance la dedans afin que sette personne resoiue le traitement quil merite en estant pas escouste: se servit [xxx] coupre les trets entre les deux couronnes: [xxx] que de faire autrement quant yl nioroit pour de mon particulier estant se que je suis alafrance je me fu tant au bon naturel du Roy monsieur mon frere et a la generosite de mon cousin le cardinal de richelieu que dans sette consideration la jan atans des effets selon mes desirs: je ne diray donc? dauantage sur ce subject que vous prier de prandre lafaire dans vostre protection et de croyre que se nest pas seullemant moy qui vous obliges la dedans: mais la juste cause de dieu par la religion et que je seray toujours, Vostre bien bonne amie Henriette Marie R. Monsieur de chauigny La Hage ce 8 sept’. Endorsed: ‘Monsieur de Chauigny The Queen of England 8th Septr’. An abbreviated translation appears in Alfred Morrison, Catalogue of the Collection of Autograph Letters etc. (1885), Vol. II.

23 Belvoir MSS QZ/22/14: ‘The Queen of England La Hage. 8 Juill. 1642 Monsieur de chauigny en voyant ce jantil homme trouuer le Roy monsieur mon frere pour le remersier de lhonneur quil ma fait par mr de qressy je saie lobligation que je vous ay dans le soing que vous aues pris de mobliger en toutes occations: sest pour quoy jay com mande a arpe de vous voir de ma part et vous en remersier: ce que je fais encore par sette lettre moy mesme vous conjura ac de vouloir continuer [xxx] [xxx] dans les occations et de croyre que vous me trouue res tres sensible des seruices que vous me randres quoy que tres incapable de le vous faire paroistre mes se ne sera pas la volonte qui fallira mes le manque de [xxx] pour lexeniter et sy jan ramonore jamais les occations vous veres que se que je vous dis est veritable et combien je suis Vostre bien bonne amie Henriette Marie R. La Hage ce 8 juillett’. Endorsed: ‘The Queen of England’. A brief description of this letter appears in Morrison, Vol II.

24 Belvoir MSS QZ/22/30: ‘The Queen of England La Hage. 26 Oct. 1642 Monsieur de chauigny parmy toute les preuues que jay reseues de vostre affection selles que leuesque dangoulesme ma randue me sont sy sensible que je nay pas voulu tarder auons en remersier particulierement dans linsertitu de que lestat presant de nos affaires me tient ne pouuant en core resoudre de quil reste le bien des affaires du Roy monseigneur mapelle ra la conjoncture presante samble deman der fort mon retour en engletaire se que ja prehanderois plus que tout les autres haza rds sy je ne croyois conseruer la mesme part dans laffection du Roy monsieur mon frere et de mon cousin le cardinal de richelieu qui me temoygnent par lesuesque dangoules me mais quant les aduantages du Roy monseigneur seront uses euidantes pour justifier mes paines je ne dois pas craindre que sela puire diminuer lestime des personnes sy affection nees et sy prudantes aussy tost que joray pris ma resolution se que respere dans peu de jours je la seray sauoir par une expres du Roy monsieur mon frere et a mon cousin le cardinal de richelieu je ne dois pas douter de la continuation de vos offises dans tout les besoings que jan pour rois auoir je en ay ases dassurances par ce que vous aues fait touchant la reseption dangier et la rest des armes preparees pour les rebelles dont je vous remersie extrememant vous priant de continuer vos soings en ce particulier car yls se font fort de tirer grand aduantages par la jespere un jour de vous pouuoir temoygner plus selon mes souest combien je suis / Monsieur de chauigny / Vostre bien bonne amie Henriette Marie R’. This appears in transcription in Morrison, Vol. II.

25 The vertebra of eighty-seven-year-old priest John Lockwood, which was cut through by the executioner, is still preserved at the Tyburn convent in London.

26 Richard Cust, ‘Charles I and the Order of the Garter’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 52, No. 2 (2013), p. 366.

27 CSPD 1641–3, 20 April 1642.

28 The lost munitions included 7,238 muskets, 3,729 swords, 906 barrels of powder, over 2,000 pistols and thousands of cannon shot; PRO SP16/490/77.

29 Belvoir MSS QZ/22/8A (see transcript above).

30 Belvoir MSS QZ/22 f. 7, 30 April 1642.

31 ‘His Majesty’s Speech to the Gentry of York 12 May 1642’ in Heylyn, p. 62.

32 Eikon Basilike, p. 43. He also had to give Parliament the right to raise soldiers as it saw fit, and give up his own right to consent to legislation, or to choose his own officers.

33 TNA SP 16/491/21; Richard Cust, Charles I and the Aristocracy 1625–1642 (2013), p. 282.

34 Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (2013), p. 363.

35 The money was being raised through the Committee of Safety.

36 At least ten from Massachusetts rose to the rank of major or above in Parliament’s armies.

37 The constitutional revolution in London’s City government saw the Court of Aldermen lose its power of veto over the decisions of the lower house, the Common Council, and the lord mayor lost his power to call and dissolve their meetings. Reforms ensured City freemen could also more freely exercise their right to vote in Council elections. The Royalist lord mayor was then dismissed, sent for trial and replaced with the radical City MP Isaac Pennington; Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (2003), p. 372.

38 Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006), p. 138.

39 William Lily, Several Observations on the Life and Death of Charles I (1651), p. 239.

40 Journal of the House of Lords, Vol. V, p. 185.

41 Roger Hudson (ed.), The Grand Quarrel: Women’s Memoirs of the English Civil War (2000), p. 53.

42 Ibid.

43 For example, Calvinist Royalists had disagreements with Laudian Royalists, Parliamentarian Presbyterians had disagreements with the Parliamentarian Independents who supported self-governing congregations. Some were prepared to allow Charles this power, some that, some would allow him no power at all.

44 Sir Edward Nicholas to Sir Thomas Roe, 15 June; CSPD 1641–3 (340). His council was divided between advocates for war and those who wanted yet another appeal for peace.

45 David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637–49 (2004), p. 38.

46 In October Charles Louis would issue a joint declaration with his mother, Elizabeth the Winter Queen, deploring his brothers’ actions, and calling on Charles to reconcile with Parliament.

47 Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray (1888), Vol. II, p. 290.

48 Marquess of Hertford to Henrietta Maria, 11 July 1642, Journal of the House of Lords, Vol. V, pp. 264b–265a.

49 Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, ed. Green, p. 101.

50 Slingsby, pp. 13, 14.

Chapter 15: Edgehill

1 CSPD 1641–3, 30 September 1642 (28).

2 Cumbria RO, Sir Philip Musgrave Corr D/Mus/Corr/4/28 (Sir Robert Strickland to ‘Madam’, 5 October 1642).

3 Carola Oman, The Winter Queen (1938, revd edn 2000), p. 354.

4 Mark Stoyle, The Black Legend of Prince Rupert’s Dog: Witchcraft and Propaganda During the English Civil War (2011), pp. 22, 23.

5 CSPD 1641–3, 30 September 1642 (28); Memoirs of Prince Rupert (1849), Vol. I, p. 401. Angry letters were addressed to the pro-Parliament Charles Louis, who pleaded with his allies, ‘It is impossible for either me, or the queen my mother, to bridle my brother’s youth and fieryness at so great a distance … and an injustice to blame us for things beyond our help’; CSPD 1641–3, 6 October (31).

6 Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray (1888), Vol. II, p. 356.

7 Charles Carlton, ‘The Face of Battle in the English Civil Wars’ in Mark Charles Fissel (ed.), War and Government in Britain, 1598– 1650 (1991), p. 236.

8 Adrian Tinniswood, The Verneys (2007), p. 177; Memoirs of Prince Rupert, Vol. II, p. 12.

9 Clarendon, Vol. II, p. 353.

10 Ibid., p. 352.

11 Mark Kishlansky, Charles I (2014), p. 83.

12 BL, TT, E 200 (67), ‘Three Speeches’.

13 Henry Ellis (ed.), Original Letters Illustrative of English History, Vol. III (1824), p. 303.

14 George Lauder, ‘The Scottish Soldier’.

15 Carlton, ‘The Face of Battle in the English Civil Wars’ in Fissel (ed.), p. 238.

16 Captain Edward Knightley, A full and true relation of the great battle fought between the King’s army, and his Excellency, the Earl of Essex, upon the 23 October last past (1642).

17 Official Parliamentary Account, The Account of the Battle at Edgehill (1642).

18 Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006), p. 178.

19 Clarendon, Vol. II, p. 353.

20 Ibid.

21 Clarendon, Vol. II, p. 353.

22 John Vicars, Jehovah Jireh (1644), p. 200.

23 Purkiss, p. 180.

24 Clarendon, Vol. II, p. 353.

25 G. Davies and Bernard Stuart, ‘The Battle of Edgehill’, English Historical Review, Vol. 36, No. 141 (January 1921), pp. 36, 37.

26 John Aubrey, Brief Lives (1999), pp. 128, 129.

27 Clarendon, Vol. II, pp. 368, 355.

28 Ellis (ed.), Vol. III, p. 304.

29 This was Denzil Holles, the MP who had orchestrated the closing scenes in the parliament of 1629, before the Eleven Years’ Tyranny; Charles Carlton, Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638–1651 (1992), pp. 118, 146.

30 Clarendon, Vol. II, p. 365.

31 Quoted in Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles (2000), p. 149.

32 CSPV 1642–3 (171).

Chapter 16: ‘Tiger’s Heart’

1 CSPV 1642–3 (239).

2 Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (1857), p. 163.

3 James F. Larkin, Royal Proclamations of Charles I (1983), p. 867.

4 Sir Henry Slingsby, Diary (1836), pp. 89, 90; Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, ed. Green, p. 163.

5 CSPV 1642–3 (244).

6 On 1 February 1643.

7 For such comments see BL, Harl. MS 164, ff. 295, 296v, 300, 301v, 302, 308; Harl. MS 1901, f. 58v; Add. MS 18777, ff. 65, 67, 148, 151–3, 158, 158v; Mercurius Aulicus, No. 7 (12–18 February 1643), pp. 85–7; No. 8 (19–25 February 1643), p. 95; Laurence Womock, Sober Sadnes, Or, Hiroticall Observations Upon the Proceedings, Protences, & Designs of a Prevailing Party in both Houses of Parliament (1643), pp. 16–17; CSPV 1642–3 (215); David Scott, ‘Politics in the Long Parliament’ in George Southcombe and Grant Tapsell (eds.), Revolutionary England, c.1630–c.1660: Essays for Clive Holmes (2016), pp. 32–55.

8 Albert Loomie, ‘The Destruction of Rubens’s “Crucifixion” in the Queen’s Chapel, Somerset House’, Burlington Magazine, Vol. 140, No. 1147, pp. 680–1.

9 Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, ed. Green, p. 182; The Works of Charles I, Vol. I (1766), p. 294.

10 Belvoir MSS QZ/23 f. 16.II. The letter from Charles to Henrietta Maria concludes movingly (out of cipher), ‘It is just a Fortnight since I had a letter from thee, w^ch I attribut to the difficulty of the passage, the same reason may hinder thee to heare frome mee; but to show thee, both my ill lucke, & diligence, I send thee this enclosed from my Agent Boswell, & lykewais asseure thee that this is the sixt letter I witten [sic] this Month one of w^ch I know has beene intercepted: At this tyme I haue no more to wryte, but to desyre thee, to send to mee, as oft as thou canst; & to giue credit, & satisfie the desyrs of this inclosed letter from 82: the best thou may: So, longing to here from thee, & infinitly desyring to see thee, I rest eternally Thyne’. 24 March 1642–3, Oxford. Thanks to Sarah Poynting for this transcription.

11 CSPV 1642–3 (268). Some Parliamentarians insisted the impeachment was not aimed against the queen’s life. Yet treason was a capital offence. She had been right that, at the very least, while the ‘perpetual parliament’ still sat, things were not likely to ‘go well’ for her in England.

12 Mercurius Aulicus (22–26 May 1643), p. 280.

13 Eikon Basilike, p. 25.

14 CSPV 1642–3 (274).

15 HLRO, Naseby Letters, No. 6.

16 HL/PO/JO/10/1/183 Letter 6; Laura Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (2011), p. 59.

17 Belvoir MSS QZ/23 f. 16.II.

18 The more famous medal struck that year was the Forlorn Hope – depicting Charles and his heir – which was cast for all the men who fought for him. The name referred to the courage and sacrifice of soldiers who faced death in leading an assault.

19 Mercurius Civicus, No. 7 (6–13 July 1643), p. 53 (E60/9); Mercurius Britanicus, No. 23 (12–19 February 1644), pp. 175, 177 (E33/21).

20 Mercurius Britanicus, No. 23 (12–19 February 1644), pp. 175, 177 (E33/21).

21 Margaret Toynbee and Peter Young, Strangers in Oxford (1973), p. 32.

22 Charles Carlton, Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638–1651 (1992), p. 93.

23 This took place in March 1643. Bodl. MS Carte 5, ff. 40r–v. Endymion Porter served as Ashburnham’s second.

24 BL, Add. MS 18980, ff. 59v–60.

25 Toynbee and Young, p. 10; Ann, Lady Fanshawe, Memoirs (1907), p. 56.

26 John Rushworth, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State, Vol. 5 (1721), p. 334 (20 June 1643).

27 Behind the scenes Charles was subject to the contradictory pressures of Royalists’ own war and peace parties. The war party, which was associated with the queen, wanted an outright military victory that would see their enemies punished, and not rewarded as part of a peace process. Their names included those of leading Catholics, but the men at its head were Protestants: amongst them the thoroughly Calvinist Prince Rupert. The Royalist peace party wanted Charles to offer enough concessions to strengthen the hand of the peace party in Parliament, and empower them to overthrow the ‘fiery spirits’ of the war party and their radical backers. They argued that Charles could then come in ‘honour and safety’ to London where he would be ‘repossessed … of his power’. With the war going well for the Royalists the war party had the upper hand in Charles’s councils. There is, however, fragmentary evidence of a plot between Royalist and Parliamentarian moderates that summer. Under new softer peace terms both armies would be disbanded, Parliament would keep all its privileges, but expelled members would be readmitted. The hope was that Essex would back this plan. It collapsed on the rock of inter-Royalist quarrels and jealousies. Rupert had persuaded Charles to sack another of his generals – Essex’s brother-in-law the Marquess of Hertford, who was a leading member of the Royalist peace party. It made Essex realise that there would be no future for him with the king restored to power. For all the details on this see David Scott, ‘Rethinking Royalist Politics’ in John Adamson (ed.), The English Civil War: Conflict and Contexts, 1640–49 (1973), pp. 46–7.

28 Sir Simonds d’Ewes, Diary, BL, Harl. MSS 165, 146b.

29 The soldier responsible claimed it was an accidental discharge; Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War (1886/1987), Vol. I, pp. 186, 187.

30 Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray (1888), Vol. III, pp. 194, 195.

31 Sir Edward Nicholas to William Hamilton, Earl of Lanark, NAS GD 406/1/1904.

32 Clarendon, Vol. III, p. 174.

33 Carlton, p. 139.

34 Journal of Sir Samuel Luke, ed. I. G. Philip (1950), p. 155.

35 Carlton, p. 227.

36 Clarendon, Vol. III, pp. 194, 195.

37 In November 1643 the first contingents of the king’s army in Ireland were already being shipped to England.

38 Michelle Anne White, Henrietta Maria and the English Civil Wars (2006), p. 131.

39 Ibid., p. 133, note 61.

40 Memoirs of Prince Rupert (1849), Vol. II, letter of 22 June, p. 101.

41 CSPD 1644 (46i, ii).

42 Henrietta Maria had never been close to Louis but she wrote of her ‘affliction’ at his loss. Belvoir MSS QZ/23/31: ‘La Reyne d’Angleterre sur la mort du Roy. Juillet 1643. Mon cousin lafliction que jay eu de la perte que jay faite du Roy Monsieur mon frere vous sera ditte par le sieur de gressy: comme aussy les resentimants que jay des temoygnages que je resois tout les jours de vostre affection: que je vous prie de continuer vous assurant que vous nobligeres jamais personne qui en soit plus recongnoisante que moy: je me remest au sieur de gressy auous dire beaucoup de choses de ma part sest pour je finiray en disant que je suis Mon cousin. Vostre bien affectionee cousine Henriette Marie R’. There is a brief description (but no transcription) of this letter in Alfred Morrison, Catalogue of the Collection of Autograph Letters etc. (1885), Vol. II.

43 In October Anne had sent a diplomat to help negotiate an honourable peace with Parliament. In February 1644 the diplomat had returned to France in despair of success.

44 Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, ed. Green, p. 149.

45 Ibid., pp. 249–50.

46 https://archive.org/stream/ReportTransactionsOfTheDevonshireAssociationVol81876/TDA1876vol8#page/n489/mode/2up.

47 Anne of Austria dispatched a doctor as soon as she learned of her sister queen’s condition and he recommended the spa. The ‘ancient and rugged castle’ from which the house of Bourbon took its name dominated the spa town, standing ‘on a flinty rock’. ‘In the midst of the streets are some baths of medicinal waters, some of them excessive hot,’ the arriving diarist John Evelyn noted. You drank the waters rather than bathed, ‘our Queen being then lodged there for that purpose’. Diary of John Evelyn, Vol. I, 24 September 1644.

48 Victor Cousin, Secret History of the French Court Under Richelieu and Mazarin (1859), p.165.

49 Erin Griffey, On Display (2015), p. 154.

50 Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, ed. Green, p. 262.

51 Ibid., p. 258.

52 White, p. 133, note 61.

Chapter 17: Enter Oliver Cromwell

1 BL, Add. MS 70499, f. 198v. He had been the Prince of Wales’s governor until Parliament had him replaced. He had diverted the boy’s energy into horsemanship and dance and his natural intelligence to literature and music, science and mechanics – but not so much to theology.

2 Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray (1888), Vol. III, p. 383.

3 Charles Carlton, Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638–1651 (1992), p. 119.

4 Ibid., p. 120, quoting the scoutmaster Lion Watson.

5 ODNB.

6 In 1644 Prynne had his revenge, acting as chief prosecutor in Laud’s long-delayed impeachment trial.

7 Sir Philip Warwick, Memories of the Reigne of Charles I (1701), pp. 247–8.

8 Ibid., also John Maidston quoted in David Nichol Smith, Characters from the Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (1918), p. 142.

9 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon quoted in Smith, p. 140.

10 Richard Baxter, http://archive.org/stream/englishpuritanis00tull/englishpuritanis00tull_djvu.txt.

11 Tristram Hunt, The English Civil War at First Hand (2002), p. 151.

12 Ibid., pp. 120–39.

13 Thomas Carte, The Life of James, Duke of Ormonde (6 vols., 1851), Vol. I, pp. 55–8.

14 Malcolm Wanklyn, The Warrior Generals (2010), p. 106.

15 Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, The Life of William Cavendish (1872), p. 154; Hunt, pp. 120–39.

16 Simeon Ashe, A Continuation of True Intelligence (1644), p. 7; around 4,000 Royalists perished, twice the number of Roundheads.

17 Belvoir MSS QZ/24 f. 55, Lord Ferdinando Fairfax to the Committee of Both Kingdoms, 6 July 1644: ‘Right Honorable Wee wrote to your Lordships of the cullors Wee had taken from the enemey And have sent this gent who was an actor in the bussines of purpose to cary so many of them as upon a sudden wee could as yet receaue from the sowers who esteeme it a credite to keepe them. The victorie which God hath given us is very great And wee shall omitt nothing within our power to improve it to the advantage of the Comonn cause & the good of both Kingdomes Wee rest Your Lordships affectionat freinds & servants Leuen Fer:fairfax Manchester from the league befor York 6th July 1644 Wee haue ressaved your letter of the 3d.’

18 For the Newbury witch reports see http://roy25booth.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/witch-at-newbury-1643.html; for more on Boy and his legend see Mark Stoyle, The Black Legend of Prince Rupert’s Dog: Witchcraft and Propaganda During the English Civil War (2011).

19 The Life, Diary, and Correspondence of Sir William Dugdale, ed. William Hamper (1827), p. 70.

20 Vernon F. Snow, Essex the Rebel (1970), p. 451.

21 Carlton, p. 244.

22 Ibid.

23 They won two victories that September.

24 BL, Add. MS 4106, ff. 205r–v., 6 May 1643.

25 Of 7,740 soldiers estimated to have come from Ireland between October 1643 and March 1644 only about 1,200 were Irish; see Mark Stoyle, Soldiers and Strangers (2005), pp. 53–62 and 209–10.

26 Charles I, The King’s Cabinet Opened: or, Certain Packets of Secret Letters & Papers (1645), letter 9.

27 CSPD 1644–5 (159).

28 Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (2003), p. 506.

29 The Junto, which had dominated the first year of the Long Parliament, had split into war and peace parties in the winter of 1642–3. The peace party had included men like Holland and Northumberland, who were anxious to make a moderate peace with Charles as soon as possible. The old war party had included those who had invited the Scots into England for the Bishops’ War of 1640, and who wanted to ensure that Charles was stripped of all meaningful power: Warwick, Essex, Saye and Sele, Pym (who had since died of cancer), Lord Brooke (killed in 1643), and others.

30 In the House of Lords they included such former war-party stalwarts as Viscount Saye and Sele, but also that former peace-party grandee Northumberland.

31 Equally the Spanish had close ties to a number of Independents who saw Louis XIV’s France as the great Catholic power and threat of the future, and men like Warwick as stuck in a fantasy of the Elizabethan past.

32 There were many MPs with a reverence for Presbyterianism who nevertheless backed Cromwell and his allies as the men who would defeat the king. Equally, many of the Presbyterian grandees disliked the notion of a Scottish-style system of church government with councils of elders, but were glad of Scottish military support against their rivals. Neither establishing Presbyterianism nor any other form of church government was the overriding concern. Most on both sides of Parliament were Erastian. They were prepared to accept a national Presbyterian church managed by Parliament, rather than Scottish-style councils of elders. London too was divided between a radical minority who supported the Independents, and the moderates who had dominated the City’s Common Council since the radical-led constitutional changes to the municipality in 1642. These wanted a restored monarchy that would back their magistracy and believed Presbyterian church courts and Scottish-style supervisory assemblies of elders would transfer local church government into their hands for the enforcement of discipline and order. They differed, therefore, from Parliament’s ‘political Presbyterians’ who wanted the state ruling the church. David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637–49 (2004), p. 86; Brenner, p. 462.

33 The Self-Denying Ordinance was passed the following day.

34 The King’s Cabinet Opened, p. 7.

Chapter 18: Evil Women

1 ODNB.

2 CSPV 1643–7 (194).

3 Charles I, The King’s Cabinet Opened: or, Certain Packets of Secret Letters & Papers (1645), p. 24.

4 Ibid., Charles to Henrietta Maria, 9 January 1645.

5 Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray (1888), Vol. III, p. 502. The fate of his three younger children, all in Parliament’s hands, was also on Charles’s mind. Elizabeth and Henry had been placed by Parliament in the care of Lucy Carlisle’s eldest brother, the Earl of Northumberland. Lucy, like Holland, was a member of the Presbyterian party that wanted a negotiated peace. Northumberland was allied to the Independents who wanted Charles’s utter defeat and Charles distrusted him as ‘one in whom Parliament confided so much’; Clarendon, Vol. III, p. 449.

6 Jonathan Wilshire and Susan Green, The Siege of Leicester 1645 (1970), with images of MS letters, pp. 12, 18.

7 Richard Simmonds, The Complete Military Diary (1989), p. 51.

8 Clarendon, Vol. IV, p. 39; Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (1857), p. 304.

9 Simmonds, p. 52.

10 Ibid.

11 Clarendon, Vol. IV, p. 39.

12 Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, 1642– 1649 (1886/1987), Vol. II, p. 233.

13 Charles Carlton, Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638–1651 (1992), p. 177.

14 Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, ed. Green, p. 304.

15 The King’s Cabinet Opened, p. 14.

16 H. C. B. Rogers, Battles and Generals of the Civil Wars (1968), pp. 208, 209.

17 Malcolm Wanklyn, The Warrior Generals (2010), p. 162.

18 Sir Henry Slingsby, Diary (1836), p. 152.

19 Ibid.

20 Clarendon, Vol. IV, p. 45.

21 Wanklyn, p. 165.

22 Ibid.

23 Gardiner, Vol. II, p. 250.

24 ‘A Most Perfect Relation’ quoted in Glenn Ford, Naseby (2004), p. 285.

25 Fewer than 1,000 Royalist soldiers were killed in the battle and its aftermath. Four times as many were simply taken prisoner.

26 BL, E.127 (39), ‘A True Declaration of Kingstons Entertainment of the Cavaliers’ (22 November 1642); Mark Stoyle, ‘The Road to Farndon Field: Explaining the Massacre of the Royalist Women at Naseby’, English Historical Review, Vol. 123, No. 503 (August 2008), p. 907; Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006), p. 138.

27 Parliament’s Post, 14 July 1645.

28 He had even shielded her from knowledge of his own mental suffering, deleting words and phrases where he thought he was revealing too much. Sarah Poynting, ‘Rhetorical Strategies in the Letters of Charles I’ in Jason McElligott and David Smith (eds.), Royalists and Royalism (2007), p. 145. Also see Derek Hirst, ‘Reading the Royal Romance: Or, Intimacy in a King’s Cabinet’, The Seventeenth Century, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Autumn 2003), pp. 211–29.

29 Marchamont Nedham, in his newspaper Mercurius Britanicus.

30 Eikon Basilike.

31 Laura Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (2011), pp. 44–66.

32 Clarendon, Vol. IV, p. 74.

33 Ibid., p. 78.

34 Gardiner, Vol. II, p. 363.

35 Mercurius Rusticus quoted in G. N. Godwin, The Civil War in Hampshire 1642–45 and the Story of Basing House (2010), p. 241.

36 The Kingdom’s Weekly Post, BL, E.304.28.

37 Godwin, p. 142.

38 Francis Bacon, Of the Advancement and Proficience of Learning (BL, Humanities, C.46.i.1.), annotation by Charles I. Cromwell would move into a house in Drury Lane the following year. Perhaps it was this death that opened the vacancy. Thanks to Sarah Poynting for this reference and transcription.

39 Hugh Peter, The Fall and Last Relation of Basing House (1645), pp. 2, 6.

40 New tax-raising powers had been instituted and an Independent-dominated executive committee created – the Army Committee, which oversaw army funding and recruitment.

41 Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (2003), pp. 475, 476. London was a very different place from 1642. Then a radical campaign had ousted the rich, Royalist City elite represented in the Upper Chamber of the Court of Aldermen and handed power to the hosiers, fishmongers, goldsmiths and woolen drapers elected to the Common Council. Now these same councillors sought to crush political and religious radicalisation in order to maintain the status quo they had come to control. Their allies in Parliament did not, however, share their enthusiasm for Scottish-style Presbyterianism, with church government controlled by councils of elders. The ‘political Presbyterians’ led by the Earl of Essex simply wanted government of the Church of England by king and bishops to be replaced by government by Parliament, so extending the control landowners maintained over parish livings to oversight by MPs (most of whom came from the same classes). See note 32, Chapter 17.

Chapter 19: ‘The Golden Ball’

1 Desiderata Curiosa ii Lib. IX, p. 20.

2 Letters of King Charles I, ed. Sir Charles Petrie (1935), p. 176.

3 There remained a substantial body of Royalist opinion that opposed any dealings with the Scots and their French allies. These so-called ‘patriot’ Royalists wanted the king restored at English hands and were keen for him to return to his capital as soon as possible. The queen’s party differed. Indeed, the split between the Royalists was almost a mirror image of the Parliamentarian splits. The Parliamentarians were split between the pro-Scots Presbyterian party and the anti-Scots Independents. The Royalists were split between the pro-Scots queen’s party and the patriots who wanted no outside intervention (but did not, of course, share the Independents’ religious agenda). The French had their own agenda. Cardinal Mazarin wanted a weak but restored king, ruling with their friends amongst the queen’s Royalist party, the Westminster Presbyterians – who included old Francophiles like Holland – the Scots and also the Royalist Irish (but not the Catholic Confederalists, who had too many friends in Spain). David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637–49 (2004), pp. 111, 113.

4 Lord Lothian, CSPD 5 May 1646 (13).

5 Scott, pp. 118–19.

6 1635, http://www.localhistories.org/newcastle.html.

7 F. J. Varley, The Siege of Oxford (1932), pp. 142, 143.

8 Ibid., p. 142.

9 Belvoir MSS QZ/26: Original Manuscripts 1646 f. 11AA, June 1646.

10 Thomas Birch, The Court and Times of Charles I (1849), Vol. II, p. 410.

11 Ibid., pp. 409, 410.

12 Scott, p. 123.

13 Also present was his favourite sister, Frances, Marchioness of Hertford, who had been painted by Van Dyck wearing the relic of their father’s hair, and whose husband was a Royalist.

14 David Nichol Smith, Characters from the Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (1918), pp. 218–19.

15 Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War (1886/1987), Vol. III, p. 186; Moderate Intelligencer, 24 December 1646.

16 Patrick Maule, Earl of Panmure to Sir Archibald Johnston, Earl Wariston, 23 January 1647, in Sir David Dalrymple (ed.), Memorials and Letters Relating to the History of Britain in the Reign of Charles the First (1766), pp. 190–1.

17 Eikon Basilike, p. 56.

18 The Earl of Lauderdale quoted in David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637–49 (2004), p 129.

19 ‘Vox Militaris: Or an Apologetical Declaration Concerning the Officers and Souldiers of the Armie, under the Command of his Excellency Sr. Thomas Fairfax’, 11 August 1647, p. 2.

20 Described by Parliamentary Commissioners, 1651; http://www.british-history.ac.uk/rchme/northants/vol3/pp103-109.

21 Gardiner, Vol. III, pp. 271, 272.

22 BL, E.391 (8); Robert Ashton, Counter Revolution (1994), p. 19.

Chapter 20: ‘A Clouded Majesty’

1 Fairfax had been in Bury St Edmunds when Joyce had visited Cromwell in London. Cromwell may have assumed that Fairfax would concur later with his decision – as Fairfax had. It was later suggested, however, that Fairfax had not been given any pre-warning of the seizure of the king as Cromwell had decided Fairfax should know no more than he was ‘pleased to carve and chew for him’. Andrew Hopper, Black Tom: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution (2007), pp. 212–13.

2 ‘A Declaration or Representation from his Excellency Sir Thomas Fairfax and the Army under his Command’ (14 June), in the Army Book of Declarations (1647), pp. 37–44.

3 It was not his first meeting. That had been with Fairfax on 7 June.

4 The Memoirs of Sir John Berkeley (1699), p. 34.

5 Charles’s visible reaction was recorded by a witness; R. Huntington (ed.), Sundry reasons inducing Major Robert Huntingdon to lay down his commission (1648), repr. in Francis Maseres (ed.), Select tracts relating to the civil wars in England etc. (1815), Vol. 2, p. 400.

6 Letters of King Charles I, ed. Sir Charles Petrie (1935), p. 231.

7 Maseres (ed.), Vol. I, p. 365; Robert Ashton, Counter Revolution (1994), p. 208.

8 Mary Anne Everett Green, Lives of the Princesses of England (1850), Vol. 6, p. 355.

9 Hopper, pp. 174–6.

10 Moderate Intelligencer, 22 July 1647.

11 David Scott, ‘Politics in the Long Parliament’ in George Southcombe and Grant Tapsell (eds.), Revolutionary England, c.1630–c.1660: Essays for Clive Holmes (2016), pp. 32–55.

12 Not least one that excluded the Scots and would permit the return of the Church of England of the old prayer book.

13 Huntington (ed.) in Maseres (ed.), Vol. II, p. 399.

14 They included Denzil Holles and Sir Philip Stapilton.

15 Memoirs of Sir John Berkeley; Maseres (ed.), Vol. II, p. 368.

16 That is excluding women, servants or other dependents. The Levellers had grown out of a group of militants who had come together in opposition to the London Presbyterians, who were particularly powerful in the City’s municipal and church government. In that respect they had been on the militant wing of the Independents. They were now, however, challenging the power of the grandees of both parties.

17 Journal of the House of Lords, 23 July 1647.

18 Weekly Intelligencer, 16 September 1647; Green, Vol. 6, p. 359.

19 Richard Lovelace, ‘To my worthy friend Master Peter Lely on that excellent picture of his Majesty and the Duke of York, Drawn by Him at Hampton Court’.

20 For a full explanation of Ireton’s thinking see Sarah Mortimer, ‘Henry Ireton and the Limits of Radicalism’ in George Southcombe and Grant Tapsell (eds.), Revolutionary England, c.1630–c.1660: Essays for Clive Holmes (2016), pp. 55–73.

21 The Agreement of the People for a Firm and Present Peace upon Grounds of Common Right.

22 C. H. Firth (ed.), The Clarke Papers, Vol. I (1891), p. 307.

23 Ibid., p. 322.

24 Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War (1886/1987), Vol. IV, p. 11; Clarendon MSS 2645.

25 Maseres (ed.), Vol. II, p. 375.

26 Numbers 35:33.

27 Raymond Phineas Stearns, Strenuous Puritan: Hugh Peter, 1598– 1660 (1954), p. 316.

28 John Fox, The King’s Smuggler (2011) p. 118.

29 Maseres (ed.), Vol. II, p. 373.

30 CSPV 10 December 1647 (60).

Chapter 21: Royalist Rising

1 Southampton had attended on the king in the last few days before his escape; E. Whalley, A More Full Relation of the Manner and Circumstances of his Majesty’s Departure from Hampton Court, 22 November 1647 (BL, E416/23).

2 John Rushworth, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State, Vol. 7 (1721), pp. 871–2.

3 Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray (1888), Vol. IV, p. 264.

4 The royal chaplain in question was Dr Henry Hammond, who would have been made a bishop had he not died on the eve of the Restoration.

5 Charles had, at first, the freedom of the Isle of Wight and he intended to make good use of it. On 17 December a ship sent by Henrietta Maria for his escape anchored in the waters off Carisbrooke. Charles pulled on his riding boots and ‘with great joy, ran to the window to see how the wind stood’. It was against them. The ship was trapped in the harbour for six days and his opportunity was lost. His hopes of escape had been noticed, however, so he lost his freedom and his friends. John Ashburnham, A Narrative by John Ashburnham etc. (1830), Vol. II, p. 120.

6 Robert Lockyer (ed.), The Trial of Charles I: A Contemporary Account Taken from the Memoirs of Sir Thomas Herbert and John Rushworth (1974), p. 36.

7 He scribbled the names of characters and preferred titles alongside his favourite plays – comedies for the most part. Thanks to Sarah Poynting for this information.

8 David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637– 49 (2004), p. 159.

9 CSPD 2 February 1648.

10 Journal of the House of Lords, Vol. X, 24 February 1648.

11 Journal of the House of Commons, Vol. V, 16 March 1648.

12 Ashburnham, Vol. II, p. 124.

13 CSPV 1648 (131), (133); ODNB Joseph Bampfield and Anne Halkett; Linda Porter, Royal Renegades (2016), pp. 184–5.

14 J. S. Clarke (ed.), The Life of James the Second (1816), Vol. I, pp. 32–3; James had been reassured that he wasn’t bound to his promise to Parliament not to escape. He was underage, and since this was a matter of state, he had needed the king’s consent to take such an oath.

15 He had also been under suspicion with the Independents after the Essex petition (the county where he had his land base).

16 On Anne of Austria and her court, see Mémoires de Madame de Motteville, tr. Katherine Wormeley, Vol. I (1886), pp. 286, 122.

17 Ibid., p. 123.

18 Karen Britland, ‘Exile or Homecoming? Henrietta Maria in France, 1644–69’ in Philip Mansel and Torsten Riotte (eds.), Monarchy and Exile (2011), p. 127.

19 Mémoires de Madame de Motteville, Vol. I, p. 286.

20 Clarendon, Vol. IV, p. 414.

21 David Lloyd, Memoirs of the Lives, Actions, Sufferings and Deaths of Those Noble Personages, that Suffered by Death, Sequestration, Decimation, Or Otherwise, for the Protestant Religion from 1637 to 1660. Continued to 1666. With the Life and Martyrdom of King Charles I (1668), p. 678; Andrew Marvell, ‘An Elegy Upon the Death of My Lord Francis Villiers’.

22 Clarendon, Vol. IV, p. 318. When the army had ridden into London in the summer of 1647, Fairfax had, in effect, conquered England for the Independents. Conquest carried with it the right by the victors to make or break laws as they pleased – to rule as tyrants. This was the slavery Holland referred to.

23 Sir Bulstrode Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs etc. (1853), Vol. I, p. 328. Distrusted since his brief defection to Oxford in 1643, he was not even to be allowed his seat in the House of Lords.

24 Several Surrey men had been killed in May when they had delivered a county petition to Parliament demanding a treaty with the king.

25 He is buried in Westminster Abbey.

26 Holland joined 150 other prisoners at St Neots. His George with its blue ribbon – the Order of the Garter – was taken along with other personal goods.

27 A Great victory obtained by Collonell Scroope against the Duke of Buckingham, at Saint Needs in Huntingtonshire. On Munday July the 10th (1648), p. 5.

28 This is in a letter preserved at Yale. https://beta.worldcat.org/archivegrid/collection/data/702172379.

29 Scott, Politics and War, p. 175.

30 Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War (1886/1987), Vol. IV, p. 162.

Chapter 22: The Red-Haired Mistress

1 Lita Rose Betcherman, Court Lady & Country Wife (2006), p. 299.

2 ODNB.

3 BL, Add. MS 19368, f. 112.

4 Sarah Poynting, ‘Deciphering the King: Charles I’s Letters to Jane Whorwood’, The Seventeenth Century, Vol. 21, No. 1 (2006), pp. 128–40.

5 Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray (1888), Vol. IV, p. 388.

6 David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637– 49 (2004), p. 177.

7 Clarendon, Vol. IV, p. 430.

8 Robert Wilcher, ‘What Was the King’s Book for?: The Evolution of “Eikon Basilike”’, Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 21, Politics, Patronage and Literature in England 1558–1658 Special Number (1991), pp. 218–28.

9 Clarendon, Vol. IV, p. 463.

10 A Remonstrance of his Excellency Lord Thomas Fairfax (1648), p. 64.

11 Richard Royston, The Works of Charles I (1661), p. 137; C. V. Wedgwood, The Trial of Charles I (1964), p. 33.

12 Letters of King Charles I, ed. Sir Charles Petrie (1935), p. 241.

13 Ibid., p. 239. Petrie is mistaken in placing Charles at Newport.

14 Robert Lockyer (ed.), The Trial of Charles I: A Contemporary Account Taken from the Memoirs of Sir Thomas Herbert and John Rushworth (1974), pp. 53, 57, 58.

15 David Underdown, Pride’s Purge (1971), p. 143.

16 Ibid., p. 144.

17 Raymond Phineas Stearns, Strenuous Puritan: Hugh Peter, 1598– 1660 (1954), p. 326.

18 Also missing was the diamond-studded great George that Charles had bestowed on the Midnight Lion, Gustavus Adolphus, and the coat of mail that Charles’s ancestor Edward IV had worn during the battles of the Wars of the Roses and which had hung over his tomb since 1483. The bronze angels and other statuary that Henry VIII had hoped would be used to make up his tomb had been sold or defaced, although some of it still survives. See Leanda de Lisle, Tudor: The Family Story (2013), p. 487, note 11.

19 Stearns, p. 330.

20 The French agent in London the Sieur de Grignon reported that the Parliamentarian Basil Feilding, Earl of Denbigh, had arrived at Windsor with a ‘final’ deal for the king backed by Cromwell. According to the rumours Denbigh hoped Charles would agree to becoming a puppet ruler in exchange for his life. Denbigh was the 1st Duke of Buckingham’s nephew. His father had been Keeper of the Great Wardrobe and the family preserved some of the clothes worn by the royal children: there was a little apron with gardening figures embroidered in blackwork, a pair of black satin and crepe breeches stamped with a paisley design, as well as purses and gloves, some dating back to the Tudors.

21 Sir Bulstrode Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs etc. (1853), Vol. I, p. 365.

22 Wilcher, p. 223.

23 ‘A Winter Dream’ quoted in Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles (2000), p. 157.

24 Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War (1886/1987), Vol. IV, p. 289.

25 ‘And do also Declare, that the Commons of England, in Parliament assembled, being chosen by, and representing the People, have the Supreme Power in this Nation: And do also Declare, That whatsoever is enacted, or declared for Law, by the Commons, in Parliament assembled, hath the Force of Law; and all the People of this Nation are concluded thereby, although the Consent and Concurrence of King, or House of Peers, be not had thereunto.’

Chapter 23: The King’s Trial

1 On 18 December 1648.

2 Boxing Day, 1648: Geoffrey Robertson, The Tyrannicide Brief (2005), p. 135.

3 Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War (1886/1987), Vol. IV, p. 290.

4 Quoted in Sean Kelsey, ‘The Trial of Charles I’, English Historical Review, Vol. 118, No. 477 (June 2003), p. 592.

5 The purged Presbyterian MP was called Edward Stephens.

6 The first proofs were ready by 14 January.

7 The house of Sir Thomas Cotton, a former MP for Huntingdon.

8 Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray (1888), Vol. IV, p. 483.

9 His own barber, Tom Davies, had been described as an enemy of the state in 1642; CSPD 1641–3 (274).

10 Such a hat, said to be his, is now in the Ashmolean Museum.

11 ‘This is conceived will be very ominous’, a news report recorded; Sir Philip Warwick, Memories of the Reigne of Charles I (1701), pp. 339–40.

12 King Charles, His Tryall &c (1649), pp. 5, 6.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid., p. 8.

15 Ibid., pp. 9–15.

16 Gilbert Burnet, History of My Own Times (1724/1833), Vol. I, p. 85.

17 Mrs Nelson, sister of Sir Purbeck Temple.

18 For Charles’s hopes and attitude to the trial, see Kelsey, pp. 583–616.

19 King Charles, His Tryall &c, pp. 39, 47.

Chapter 24: Execution

1 Sir Purbeck Temple in William Cobbett, Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials (1809–26), eds. Thomas Bayly Howell et al., Vol. V, p. 1151.

2 Sir Philip Warwick quoted in David Nichol Smith, Characters from the Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (1918), p. 54.

3 An organ from this period survives today in the small church of St Nicholas at Stanford-on-Avon in the Midlands.

4 Ronald Lightbown, ‘Charles I and the Art of the Goldsmith’ in Arthur MacGregor (ed.), The Late King’s Goods (1989), pp. 251, 252.

5 Sir Thomas Herbert’s account in Robert Lockyer (ed.), The Trial of Charles I: A Contemporary Account Taken from the Memoirs of Sir Thomas Herbert and John Rushworth (1974), p. 119.

6 By the artist Gerard van Honthorst; The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, Volume I: 1603–1631, ed. Nadine Akkerman (2015), p. 507.

7 Herbert in Lockyer (ed.), p. 120.

8 CSPV 1649 (224).

9 Sent on 13 January and brought by Henry Seymour, see W. Sanderson, Life and Raigne of King Charles (1658), p. 1135.

10 Eikon Basilike.

11 Sir Philip Warwick, quoted in Smith, p. 112.

12 Herbert in Lockyer (ed.), p. 123.

13 Ibid.

14 Roger Williams to John Winthrop Jr, 26 May 1649, 3, MHS Collection IX, 286; Cobbett, Vol. V, p. 1132; Isaiah 14:19.

15 CSPV 1647–52 (236).

16 Herbert in Lockyer (ed.), p. 124.

17 CSPV 1647–52 (246).

18 Herbert in Lockyer (ed.), p. 126.

19 CSPV 1647–52 (246).

20 Ibid.

21 This witness was a friend of Sir Philip Warwick, who recorded his story.

22 HMC, Lord de L’Isle and Dudley MSS, Vol. VI, p. 583.

23 Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War (1886/1987), Vol. IV, p. 323.

24 HMC, Lord de L’Isle and Dudley MSS, Vol. VI, p. 583.

25 Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey, A history of the George worn on the scaffold by Charles I (1908), p. 28.

26 In the contemporary mica images of the execution kept at Carisbrooke Castle, the next image is of a blue sky, with wheeling birds; George Evelyn to John Evelyn, 30 January 1648, BL, Add. MS 78303, Evelyn Papers: George Evelyn Corr, f. 34.

27 Andrew Marvell, ‘An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’.

28 William Dugdale quoted in Robert B. Partridge, ‘O Horrable Murder’: The Trial, Execution and Burial of King Charles I (1998), p. 97.

29 Ibid., p. 96. When Charles’s corpse was exhumed in the nineteenth century it was found that his hair was cut short at the back.

30 CSPV 1647–52 (246).

31 Sir Purbeck Temple in Cobbett, Vol. V, p. 1151.

32 Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray (1888), Vol. IV, p. 492.

33 Mica miniature at Carisbrooke Castle; Sir Purbeck Temple in Cobbett, Vol. V, p. 1151.

34 A contemporary diary notes that ‘the man who had held the head up then threw it down’, so that it ‘bruised the face’; The Life, Diary, and Correspondence of Sir William Dugdale, ed. William Hamper (1827), p. 96.

35 Mémoires de Madame de Motteville, tr. Katherine Wormeley, Vol. II (1902), pp. 84, 86.

36 Thomas Birch, The Court and Times of Charles I (1849), Vol. II, pp. 381, 382.

Chapter 25: Resurrection

1 Sir Thomas Herbert, Memoirs of the Last Two Years of the Reign of Charles I (1815), p. 198.

2 Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray (1888), Vol. IV, p. 493; Herbert, p. 199.

3 Journal of the House of Commons, 8 February 1649: what the Commons resolution referred to as Henry VIII’s ‘chapel’ was just the room in which the statuary etc. for his tomb (sold and broken up in 1646) had been stored, along with the marble sarcophagus that yet remained. See Leanda de Lisle, Tudor: The Family Story (2013), p. 487, note 11.

4 The Canon of Windsor, David Stokes, later claimed Charles planned to build a mausoleum for himself and future kings there.

5 Journal of the House of Commons, 8 February 1649.

6 Herbert, p. 203.

7 Allan Fea, Memoirs of the Martyr King (1904), pp. 149–50, and note pp. 151–2. He had also taken some velvet.

8 Ronald Lightbown, ‘Charles I and the Art of the Goldsmith’ in Arthur MacGregor (ed.), The Late King’s Goods (1989), pp. 252–4.

9 Fea, p. 150.

10 Herbert, pp. 205–6.

11 Barbara Donagan, ‘A Courtier’s Progress: Greed and Consistency in the Life of the Earl of Holland’, Historical Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2 (June 1976), p. 352, quoting the scaffold speech.

12 HMC, Lord de L’Isle and Dudley MSS, Vol. VI, p. 587.

13 Approximately £1,400 today.

14 The Several Speeches of Duke Hamilton Earl of Cambridge, Henry Earl of Holland, and Arthur Lord Capel, Upon the Scaffold Immediately before their Execution, On Friday the 9. of March. Also the several Exhortations, and Conferences with them, upon the Scaffold, by Dr Sibbald, Mr Bolton, & Mr Hodges (1649).

15 The Correspondence of Bishop Brian Duppa and Sir Justinian Isham 1650–1660, ed. Sir Gyles Isham (1955), p. 75.

16 Chevreuse had returned to England only once since the civil war and most unwillingly. In 1645 she had been forced, yet again, into exile from France, and was captured in the Channel by the Parliamentarian navy. They took her to the Isle of Wight and offered her back to Cardinal Mazarin who didn’t want her and so Chevreuse had journeyed on to Flanders. Victor Cousin, Secret History of the French Court Under Richelieu and Mazarin (1859), p. 165.

17 Michael Prawdin, Marie de Rohan (1971), p. 190.

18 Apologists for these events insist it has to be seen in the context of the Thirty Years War. But the Thirty Years War had ended several years previously. It has to be seen in the context of British history, not that of Germany.

19 Carola Oman, The Winter Queen (1938, revd edn 2000), p. 157.

20 Erin Griffey, On Display (2015), p. 186.

21 These details are all given in a contemporary letter. HMC, Lord de L’Isle and Dudley MSS, Vol. VI, p. 623.

22 Mémoires de Madame de Motteville, tr. Katherine Wormeley, Vol. II (1902), p. 86.

23 Lettres de Henriette-Marie de France, reine d’Angleterre, à sa soeur Christine, duchesse de Savoie, Vol. V, ed. Hermann Ferrero (1881), p. 126.

24 The ‘Assumption’ section of a painting of the Assumption of the Virgin was, however, cut off while in his care.

25 Francis Haskell, The King’s Pictures (2003), pp. 146–50.

26 James had been set up with his own court, and was an active Lord High Admiral: a title first given to him by his father aged five.

Postscript

1 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon quoted in David Nichol Smith, Characters from the Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (1918), p. 53.

2 Clarendon quoted in ibid., p. 49.

3 Peter Heylyn quoted in John Milton, Observations Upon the Articles of Peace (1649), p. 96.

4 Ibid.

5 William Laud, Works (1847–60), Vol. III, p. 443.

6 Clarendon quoted in Smith, p. 51.

Appendix

1 Mémoires de M. de La Rochefoucauld, etc. Together with the Memoirs of A. P. de La Rochefoucauld, Duke de Doudeauville, written by himself, ed. François Claude (1861), Vol. II, pp. 12–13. See also Mémoires de Louis-Henri de Loménie, Comte de Brienne, secrétaire d’état sous Louis XIV (1828), Vol. I, pp. 331–45.

2 The only gift of diamonds mentioned in 1625, when Buckingham had last seen Anne, was a collar Buckingham had been given by Louis. Besides the French memoirs Sir Roger Coke also claimed the queen had sent Buckingham, if not a necklace, then her garter ‘and an exceedingly rich jewel’; Roger Coke, A detection of the court and state of England during the four last reigns … (1696), p. 234. On the diamonds mentioned in 1625 see CSPV 1625–6 (153). On real plots against Richelieu and the key role of Chevreuse, possibly the originator of the necklace legend, see http://journal.xmera.org/journalarchive/dobbie.pdf.

Acknowledgements

Writing a one-volume biography of Charles was a daunting prospect and I couldn’t have managed it without help. I am particularly grateful to Dr David Scott for reading a messy draft and commenting on it with patience and generosity. Since I didn’t feel I could force him to read it a hundred times, and I work by a process of writing and rewriting, I may have swapped old errors for new ones, for which, of course, I am alone responsible. I am also grateful for conversations and email contacts I have had with other historians. John Adamson (who drew my attention to Lucy Carlisle), Sarah Poynting (with whom I have swapped transcripts, and who is editing a book on Charles I’s writings), John Guy, Peter Marshall, Desmond Seward and Erin Griffey have shown much kindness and support.

Thank you also to archivist Peter Foden for his invaluable help with transcriptions and some translations, and to my friend Dominic Pearce for his crucial help with other translations, and also to my father-in-law, Gerard de Lisle. The staff at the British Library and London Library are always extremely helpful, and I would particularly like to mention those at the London Library’s Country Orders Department who post me books or email me scanned pages, and make a huge difference to my working life. I would further like to thank my supportive and very patient editors Becky Hardie, Penny Hoare, Clive Priddle and David Milner, as well as my ever wonderful and incredibly efficient agent, Georgina Capel.

I am extremely grateful also for the generosity of the Duke of Rutland, who granted me permission to research from his incredible archives, to Sir William Dugdale and others who also granted me access to previously unrecorded royal letters and to the Earl and Countess of Denbigh for allowing me to photograph some of their remarkable Stuart relics. To Philip Mould for the images he freely lent me, to Florence Evans of the Weiss Gallery, to Dominic Gwynn of Goetze and Gwynn, to Simon Wright and the Sealed Knot Society, and also to the owner of Charles I’s saddle, who rarely allows the publication of any images of this royal relic from the battlefield of Naseby. Finally, I would like to thank Tracey Doyle and Janette Herbert for their huge support during times of family illness, as well as Flick Rohde and Nicola Vann.

APPENDIX

LUCY CARLISLE AS MILADY DE WINTER

BUCKINGHAM’S EMBASSY TO France in 1625 and the trade war with France of the following year provide the complex political and diplomatic background to a number of fictional stories and gossip, often taken as fact, which helped inspire Dumas’ The Three Musketeers.

Taken together the earlier accounts – some dating back to the late seventeenth century and other nineteenth-century forgeries of seventeenth-century memoirs – describe a plot by Richelieu to destroy the reputations of Buckingham and the queen consort of France, Anne of Austria. The origins of the story lie in Buckingham’s courtly attention to Anne in 1625. Lucy Carlisle is presented as so jealous of his compliments to Anne that she agrees to work for Richelieu. Lucy is to steal some diamond pendants Anne had given to Buckingham, and which Anne had taken from a necklace that had been a gift from her husband, Louis XIII. Lucy seizes her opportunity during a ball at Windsor. Buckingham is wearing his Garter sash pinned with Anne’s diamonds. Lucy, dancing with him, surreptitiously cuts off two stones. When Buckingham discovers the theft he guesses what is being plotted. As Lord High Admiral, he shuts the Channel ports. Buckingham has new stones cut in time for Anne to appear at a ball wearing the full necklace, and Richelieu’s plans are thwarted.¹

In Dumas, this story is repeated with Lucy’s part reinvented in the character of the fictional Milady de Winter. In reality the only diamonds we know were given to Buckingham in France came from Louis XIII.² And far from being deadly enemies, Buckingham remained on good terms with Lucy ‘Milady’ Carlisle, although the same cannot be said of his relations, who detested her.

Chapter 1

^fn1 People believed God had created peace and order from chaos when the cosmos was born. He created a perfect hierarchy – the Chain of Being. This placed mankind above animals on earth and above angels in heaven. The devil rebelled against this and sought to return the universe to chaos. He tempted the first woman, Eve, to rebel against God and she brought suffering and disharmony into the world.^fn2 The teachings the Puritans were most anxious to drum home began with the Calvinist teaching on predestination: that God has chosen ‘elect’ individuals for heaven, in return for faith, while everyone else goes to hell. Puritans referred to themselves as the ‘Godly’, by which they meant the ‘elect’. Although no good you did on earth could make you one of the elect, Puritans followed a ‘pilgrim’s progress’ that brought them some reassurance that they were amongst the chosen. This involved shunning the society of the impious, being fastidious in attention to moral detail, and spending hours in prayer and listening to sermons. This gained access to God’s grace, and through grace you gained faith and could be ‘born again’ as a Christian to live a holier life. Eventually your journey would reach the final stage of ‘glorification’, when you ‘knew’ you were one of the saved.

Chapter 2

^fn1 To Puritans the war in Europe was evidence that the End of Days was approaching. As the preeminent Calvinist kingdom England had a divinely ordained role to lead the final battle against the Antichrist – a demonic entity that they believed was embodied in the papacy. This ruled out any peace or compromise with the Habsburgs who were seen as the military arm of the Counter-Reformation. For more moderate Protestants the Pope was not a demon but merely the invalid leader of a Catholic Church in need of Protestant reform. This allowed them to be open to the possibility of peace in the way the Puritans were not.^fn2 Buckingham could hardly forget that one of Henry VIII’s first actions on inheriting the throne had been to arrest two of his father’s loyal and effective, but most hated, servants. They were later executed.

Chapter 3

^fn1 Her sense of her own status is reflected in her family motto: ‘Roi ne puis, Prince ne daigne, Rohan suis’: ‘King I cannot be, Prince deign not to be, Rohan I am.’

Chapter 4

^fn1 In the 1550s Protestants had argued there were biblical injunctions against female rule. To get round this issue when the Protestant Elizabeth became queen it was explained that royal sovereignty was ‘mixed’ with that of Parliament and so it was not ‘she that rules, but the laws’.^fn2 One example Charles gave was that when he sent instructions that her household use the same rules as had governed that of his late mother, she had sent back an open rebuke, observing that she hoped he would allow her to look after her own household as she thought fit. He assumed she hadn’t meant to be so rude and so raised the matter with her, ‘calmly’ explaining that she shouldn’t have affronted him publicly and why she was wrong not to follow his mother’s household orders. She told him exactly what she thought of this, and then insisted that when he wished to see her he make an appointment. Letters of King Charles I, ed. Sir Charles Petrie (1935), p. 43.^fn3 A fortified white wine such as sherry.

Chapter 5

^fn1 Years later the queen would recall how, once, trapped on a ship in a storm with her ladies-in-waiting, she had heard several of them shouting out confessions of their sins above the noise of the wind – afterwards when they were safely back on shore she had teased them mercilessly about their guilty secrets.

Chapter 6

^fn1 They did not bow from the waist as breeches and doublets were worn fastened together.^fn2 The Three Cranes got its name from the timbers used to winch barrels of wine from boats on the river outside it. Drink here was cheap, and the playwright Ben Jonson described its regulars as ‘Pretenders to wit’ who had not ‘a corn of true salt, not a grain of right mustard amongst them’. Bartholomew Fair, Act I, Scene I. Samuel Pepys later complained that even the best room in house was no better than ‘a narrow dog-hole’.

Chapter 7

^fn1 Warwick had sponsored about half the aristocracy’s privateering ventures against Spain since 1626.

Chapter 8

^fn1 Henrietta Maria was particularly grateful for the introduction to Bernini, the greatest sculptor of his day. Van Dyck had painted the king’s head from three angles, so he could do a bust of him.

Chapter 10

^fn1 Shakespeare used the term ‘cavaleros’ in Henry IV Pt 2. It is from the same Latin root as the French word ‘chevalier’.

Chapter 13

^fn1 The Elizabethan colonist Edmund Spenser (author of The Faerie Queen) in ‘A Brief Note on Ireland’ had declared that the sword would never effectively wipe out Irish Catholics so ‘famine must be the means’. Twenty per cent of the population of Ireland would die under the Commonwealth to famine and the diseases that followed in famine’s wake.

Chapter 14

^fn1 In June Ireland’s Catholic leaders had formed a Confederation with its own General Assembly and Supreme Council. It would govern Catholic Ireland for the next seven years and raise its own army and navy against the feared threat of an English invasion. The Protestant Lords Justices had, meanwhile, issued orders that their men could execute people without trial under martial law.^fn2 In a previously unrecorded letter by Charles of 4 August he orders the herald William Dugdale to disarm the castles of Warwick and Banbury held by Lord Brooke, and if they resist to declare them traitors. I have passed on details to Sarah Poynting, who is editing a comprehensive volume of Charles’s writings. The letter is held by a Dugdale descendant.

Chapter 15

^fn1 Lindsey had already lost one argument with Charles’s Scottish field marshal, Patrick Ruthven, Earl of Forth, over whether or not to use a Swedish or Dutch deployment, with Charles ruling in favour of the former.^fn2 Two centuries later, in another civil war on the other side of the Atlantic, at the Battle of Gettysburg, it was noticed that the stress on the heart caused men to fall asleep in the middle of the fighting.

Chapter 16

^fn1 When Henrietta Maria reached Nevers in October 1644, her dwarf Jeffrey Hudson challenged the brother of the captain of her guard to a duel. The weapons chosen were pistols on horseback. The cavalier didn’t take it seriously, and arrived armed only with a giant squirt with which to ‘extinguish’ Hudson and his powder. Hudson shot him in the head. Henrietta Maria had raised Hudson since he was seven years old, when he had sprung out of a pie, eighteen inches high and perfectly proportioned. At Henrietta Maria’s request he was spared execution for murder, though he was obliged to leave her household. She would never see him again. He was captured at sea by Barbary pirates and he was to spend the next twenty-five years as a slave. His freedom from his Muslim captors was then purchased along with those of other English slaves. In England, however, he was imprisoned for his Catholic faith in 1676, and though eventually released in 1680 he died only two years later.

Chapter 17

^fn1 Their new Scottish allies were enthusiastic witch burners. King James, who had burned many witches in Scotland, had even written one of his famous tracts on witches. Charles viewed the obsession with English disdain. Witchcraft in England had been made a capital offence in common law under Queen Elizabeth and there had been several efforts to tar leading Catholics – even members of the royal family – by accusing them of witchcraft, but it had not been very successful. A few English witches were burned during James’s reign but he lost enthusiasm for the stake as his rule in England went on. Catholic Ireland had still fewer cases.^fn2 A notable Royalist massacre had taken place in Bolton – known as the Geneva of the north – on 28 May. Parliamentarians claimed 1,600 defenders were slaughtered after Rupert stormed the town. Seventy-eight were listed in the parish register, but this would not have included soldiers from outside the town. They did include the names of two women. Royalists said their anger had been triggered by the murder of a soldier who had served against the Irish rebels for the king, but was hanged by the Roundheads as a papist. Many Royalist soldiers had been raised in Lancashire, a county which still had many Catholics. Later on 11 July after a skirmish in Dorchester, Parliamentarians had captured eight ‘Irish’ prisoners. Seven were hanged – the eighth spared ‘for doing execution on his fellows’. This in turn provoked further Royalist reprisals in the killing of prisoners; http://www.british-history.ac.uk/rushworth-papers/vol5/pp677-748.

Chapter 18

^fn1 The hostile crowd included Sir John Clotworthy, the man who had destroyed the Rubens in Henrietta Maria’s chapel.^fn2 According to a legend that appears in a Victorian history of Montrose by Mowbray Morris, Carnwath’s bastard daughter led a troop of cavalry alongside Montrose the previous year. Mrs Pierson, aka Captain Frances Dalzell, rode under a standard that bore the image of a naked man hanging from a gibbet and the motto ‘I dare’. Disappointingly the story may be too good to be true.

Chapter 19

^fn1 He was prepared to agree that the Presbyterian religious status quo in England be maintained for three years (or even five), while twenty Presbyterians, twenty Independents, plus twenty of his own divines thrashed out recommendations for the future of the church. These would then be put to king and Parliament. The militia he was prepared to give up for ten years, or even his whole lifetime, so long as the traditional royal powers would revert to his son on his death.^fn2 Fairfax and Cromwell would deny giving Joyce any orders to remove Charles from Holdenby. It seems likely they had ordered him only to take control of the house.

Chapter 21

^fn1 Christmas had been banned in Presbyterian Scotland in 1640. The English Parliament had done so in June 1647, when Easter and Whitsun were also abolished. The celebrations of Thanksgiving in the United States and Hogmanay in Scotland are reminders that Christmas was not celebrated amongst the Puritan settlers in America or amongst Presbyterian Scots until very modern times. In the United States Christmas only became a public holiday in 1870, in Scotland not until 1958.^fn2 A previously unrecorded letter by Henrietta Maria kept in a private archive in Warwickshire offers an example. Written 3 August, it requires free passage out of France for Sir William Dugdale (who is carrying dispatches to England), his men and baggage.^fn3 In Wales former Parliamentarian officers were court-martialled and shot. Later reports indicate that this was also the fate of a former quartermaster general to the Earl of Essex, a Dutchman called Dolbier, captured at St Neots.

Chapter 22

^fn1 He was furious when Henrietta Maria’s priests limited his access to her bedchamber on religious days, and their numerous children are testament to the importance of the physical side of their marriage.^fn2 A third officer, who had already cast aside his doublet, ready to be shot, was told he was to be spared. His birth in Florence had saved him. The Parliamentarians didn’t want their own relatives to suffer a revenge attack if ever they toured Italy.^fn3 Even today it remains a formidable sight as you approach it by sea from the Isle of Wight.

Chapter 23

^fn1 Was it true that England had been an hereditary kingdom for 1,000 years? Henry VII, the first Tudor king, had not ruled by hereditary right – he had none. Henry VII had claimed his right by divine providence. His ‘right’ (never described) was affirmed by parliamentary statute in 1485. Elizabeth I, a bastard in law, owed her right to the throne to statute. King James had succeeded the last Tudor by hereditary right, but the proclamation in 1603 had been signed and approved by representative peers, gentry and councillors. Without that backing it would not have happened – and it was considered necessary to confirm James’s right in statute the following year. England was not quite an elective monarchy – but it was not merely hereditary.^fn2 The crown in the upper right corner is ‘beatam & aeternam’ (blessed & eternal), which is to be contrasted with the temporal crown at the king’s foot, ‘splendidam & gravem’ (splendid & heavy). He holds the martyr’s crown of thorns, ‘asperam & levem’ (bitter & light).

Chapter 24

^fn1 One day it would come in very useful.^fn2 The seals Charles had left Elizabeth and Henry were amongst the things listed for sale. The George, purchased for £70, would be sold on to Charles II by one of the officers who had attended the king’s execution – a Colonel Thomlinson. A brother of Cromwell’s son-in-law, Ireton, would purchase the garter Charles wore on his knee on the scaffold for £205, well above its valuation of £160. Its 412 diamonds were broken up for profit and resale.

Chapter 25

^fn1 The famous snowstorm described by Thomas Herbert is uncorroborated testimony recalled after the Restoration. Like the image of the smiling corpse, his tale reflects the propaganda of Charles’s last testimony, the Eikon Basilike, that would sustain Royalists in the years ahead: the myth of Charles the martyr.^fn2 In due course Sir Henry Vane the younger, former governor of Massachusetts, would also go to the block.^fn3 The late Duke of Buckingham’s white suit that he had worn in Paris in 1625 had, by contrast, been estimated at a value of over £4,000.

Preface: Venturous Knight

^fn1 For Catholics, Christ’s death on Calvary is an event of such cosmic significance that it is not bound by time. The Mass, the central act of Catholic worship, tears away the veil between the present and the past, to the moment of Christ’s sacrifice. As it is a sacrifice, the Mass is carried out on an altar. There, when the priest says the mystical words at the moment of consecration, the bread and wine become Christ’s body and blood – a miracle known as ‘transubstantiation’. Luther’s moderated view was that, while the bread and wine did not entirely transform, there was a ‘Real Presence’ of God in the Eucharist. For Reform Protestants the Communion service was an act of remembrance called ‘the Lord’s Supper’.

Postscript

^fn1 Charles was more interested in plays than is commonly realised – as well as less prim. He contributed to the creation of the plot of James Shirley’s racy play The Gamester and loved the results when it played at court in 1634. Percy Simpson, ‘King Charles I as Dramatic Critic’, The Bodleian Quarterly Record, Vol. VIII, No. 92, pp. 257–262.