Читать книгу To Catch A King: Charles II's Great Escape - Charles Spencer, Charles Spencer - Страница 15

Continue the same endeavours for Prince Charles as thou hast done for me, and [do] not … whine for my misfortunes in a retired way, but, like thy father’s daughter, vigorously assist Prince Charles to regain his own.

Charles I to Henrietta Maria, 22 April 1646

The regicides – those few dozen men who had found brief common cause in January 1649 to rush through the judgement and execution of the king – found, after the royal beheading, that they had little to unite them. They immediately broke up into ill-defined factions, sharply divided over the best direction for the newborn republic.

On one side was Oliver Cromwell, the God-fearing East Anglian gentleman who had risen to become second-in-command of the New Model Army. The might of this Parliamentary military machine had been chiselled from the professionalism and religious conviction of its Puritan veterans. Cromwell, having delivered up great victories, had the army’s overriding support.

He and his tight knot of political supporters, many of whom were his relatives, hoped that Charles I’s execution would be the final act of the English Civil War, bringing to an end a conflict that had claimed the life of one in twenty Englishmen. Cromwell looked now for conciliation and reform, while remaining ready to stamp out further Royalist resistance with his troops, should it surface.

John Bradshaw was prominent among those regicides with a very different view of how things must now be. A lawyer plucked from obscurity to become lord president of the impromptu court that had sent the king to his doom, Bradshaw saw the execution of a tyrannical ruler as a thrilling act that should be celebrated, and then built upon. While Cromwell hoped the king’s death would demark a full stop, Bradshaw saw it as a mere comma in the unfurling script of England’s electrifying new story.

Those who had overseen Charles I’s execution dominated the Council of State, the executive body established the month after the king’s death. A replacement for the Privy Council, it was responsible for domestic and foreign policy, as well as the security of England and Wales. Eighteen of its forty-one councillors had been among those to sign the royal death warrant.

All of the councillors and the other regicides could agree on one thing: that the fledgling republic needed to be sustained. But there were others who felt that a unique opportunity for constitutional change had been lamentably mismanaged. They had suffered in the fight against the king, and now expected their aspirations to be honoured. Among them was a radical group known to its detractors as ‘the Levellers’.

The Levellers were still working on their manifesto, which they had begun two years earlier, at the time of the king’s death. An Agreement of the People was intended to be the blueprint for a written constitution, stating the inalienable rights of all Englishmen, and detailing the contract between them and their elected representatives. It demanded equality for all before the law, and that the vote be open to all men over twenty-one, other than Royalists, servants and beggars. England’s New Chaines Discovered, published immediately after the establishment of the Council of State, was a protest that these hopes had been ignored. The Levellers accused the new government of seizing power from the people. Their leaders were arrested for their effrontery.

But this movement, based on principle, remained dangerous in the months following the execution of the king, and it had support in the army, which had suffered so greatly in the cause against the Crown. Richard Lockier, one of the Levellers’ leaders, was captured, then executed by firing squad outside St Paul’s Cathedral in late April 1649. This stoked up a wider military mutiny. There were many in the army who had been inspired by Leveller ideas, and who were also furious at arrears in their pay, while being frightened at the prospect of being sent to fight in the graveyard of disease-ridden, boggy Ireland. Cromwell defeated the main mutineer force, in a night attack at Burford in Oxfordshire. While 300 of them were pardoned, three of the ringleaders were shot in the village’s churchyard. Even though Cromwell could declare the Leveller threat in the army over by the end of May 1649, there was still much for the new regime to settle before it could consider itself established. A myriad of hopes had been raised by the toppling of the Crown, and not all of them could be satisfied.

Six weeks after Charles I’s beheading, kingship was abolished, Parliament declaring: ‘The office of a King in a nation, and to have power thereof in a single person, was unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety, and public interest of the people, and therefore ought to be abolished.’1

In a further dramatic break with the past, the Royal Seal in the House of Commons was smashed into pieces by a hammer-wielding labourer. Its replacement contained the text: ‘In the First Year of Freedom, by God’s Blessing Restored.’ Ancient liberties, notionally lost under centuries of kingship, were being celebrated and reinstated under the new regime: the Commonwealth.

John Bradshaw’s allies included two men who were responsible for the twin struts of the new regime’s printed propaganda. The great poet and man of letters John Milton, who now championed the regicides in written duels with their European detractors, was given the title of Secretary for Foreign Tongues.

Meanwhile Milton’s friend Marchamont Nedham – a journalist and pamphleteer who had supported Parliament, then sided with the king, before getting firmly behind the new republic – oversaw the influential weekly newsbook Mercurius Politicus from June 1650. He took on this important journalistic role at a key moment in the Commonwealth’s campaign to make the republic more devout. The Puritan leadership felt this was required in order to secure God’s continuing favour. In May 1650 Parliament passed an Act condemning those guilty of incest, adultery and fornication. The incestuous and adulterous could expect the death penalty, ‘without clergy’ being in attendance at their end. Fornicators received a three-month prison sentence for their first offence. A few months later, the blasphemous joined the swelling ranks of outlaws.

Mercurius Politicus produced journalism of the highest class, engaging correspondents throughout Europe, while having access to the republic’s all-seeing spy network. Nedham was given a salary of £100 a year, ‘whereby he may subsist while endeavouring to serve the Commonwealth’.2

The rise of printed domestic news and propaganda was a pronounced feature of the English Civil War. The first such publication, The Heads of Severall Proceedings in this Present Parliament, appeared in November 1641, nine months before hostilities began. There was then an explosion of the printed word, with approximately 300 different partisan newsbooks competing for attention during the 1640s and 1650s. Although many faded away after a few issues, several of them appeared with regularity, the most popular having a run of up to 1,500 copies at a time.3

Milton and Nedham were both relentless promoters of the kingless state. One of their constant refrains was the merciless mockery of any who proposed that Charles, Prince of Wales – who was sometimes referred to as ‘the Young Pretender’ – should regain his family’s throne. These attacks showed what a terrifying prospect it was for those who had killed the father, should the son return to hold them to account.

The question for those Royalists who had been so decisively defeated in two civil wars, between the summers of 1642 and 1648, was who would provide the manpower to make it possible to challenge Parliament’s army, now their own forces had been crushed. The answer to this was most vigorously addressed by the widowed queen.

When Henrietta Maria was informed of her husband’s execution, she stood mute and motionless for an age, seized by a shock that she seems not to have come fully to terms with during the remaining twenty years of her life. In the aftermath of Charles I’s death she retreated briefly to a Carmelite nunnery. On re-emerging she wore mourning clothes, and would do so for the rest of her days.

Henrietta Maria wrote of her wish to ‘retire with only two maids, my secretary, and confessor, to private life, to finish my days with the least possible disturbance, disentangled from the world’.4 She could not forget, though, the hopes and wishes that her husband had shared with her during the darkest periods of the later years of his rule.

In July 1646 he had written to her: ‘And though the worst should come, yet I conjure thee to turn thy grief into a just revenge upon my enemies, and the repossessing of Prince Charles into his inheritances.’5 Two months earlier he had sent a letter to his eldest son that had equal clarity: ‘I command you to obey [your mother] in everything, except religion, concerning which I am confident she will not trouble you.’6

Charles was convinced that his wife could be a great support to their eldest son, for he knew how heavily he himself had leant on her throughout the Civil Wars. When the king’s baggage train was captured at the battle of Naseby in June 1645, the correspondence unearthed there revealed the full extent of Henrietta Maria’s hold over her husband. One letter particularly appalled Parliament. In it, Charles had written: ‘I give thee power to promise in my name, to whom thou thinkest most fit, that I will take away all the penal laws against the Roman Catholics in England, as soon as God shall enable me to do it.’7 One of the main charges levelled against the king by his Puritan and Presbyterian enemies had been that he was secretly sympathetic to Roman Catholicism, thanks to his wife’s corrosive influence. This letter conclusively proved the point.

Henrietta Maria knew her husband to be weak, and easily swayed by his advisers. She wrote despairingly of how he was apt ‘to take sudden counsels’,8 many of which, she felt, ran contrary to the Crown’s and her family’s interests.

This situation had become much more difficult for Henrietta Maria to control after she and Charles parted at Abingdon, for what would turn out to be the last time, on 17 April 1644. She had hugged her husband’s knees, begging him to let her stay by his side. But he was adamant that she must go abroad, to secure him aid. Her usefulness in that purpose overrode his thoughts for himself, because, he said, her remaining with him would be his ‘greatest consolation’. ‘And I found myself ten leagues distant from him,’ the queen would recall, ‘before I became conscious that I had left him, so much did grief overcome my natural senses’.9 The great sadness of parting aside, Henrietta Maria was also troubled at leaving her husband far removed from her controlling hand.

The queen was proud to be a child of one of France’s great kings, Henri IV, who had been stabbed to death by an assassin when she was less than six months old. She hoped that those who governed the land of her birth would respect her position as one of its princesses, and choose to help her family in its quest for restoration to its royal powers. But the French were embroiled in European conflict, principally the Franco–Spanish War, which had started in 1635 and would rumble on till 1659. They also had to contend with the ‘Fronde’, their own civil war, which erupted in 1648, largely brought about by the huge cost of funding France’s wars.

Meanwhile Henrietta Maria’s brother, Louis XIII, died in 1643. She had hoped he would help her and her husband to overpower the English rebels. Now, she found, France’s leading figures were mostly delighted to stand and watch the spectacle across the Channel as their centuries-old enemy tore itself in two.

Henrietta Maria had written to her only surviving brother, the Duke of Orléans, at the beginning of 1646: ‘I expect nothing but entire ruin, unless France assists us.’10 But Orléans was unable to help. He was frequently at odds with Anne of Austria, his young nephew Louis XIV’s mother and regent, and with the chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin. Meanwhile Anne and Mazarin’s foreign policy was focused on the fight with Spain, with England’s discord merely a delicious side dish.

Despite this, Mazarin, the consummate diplomat, seemed to promise much to Henrietta Maria. ‘Had I believed Cardinal Mazarin,’ she wrote, ‘I should have thought he was putting to sea with the most powerful army that had ever left France, for the help of our lost kingdoms.’ After being repeatedly let down by him, she concluded bitterly ‘that all that he said was only a cheat to quiet me’. But she never gave up hope that France could be persuaded to do the right thing for her and for her family.

When Mazarin funded the Duke of Modena in a failed bid against Spain, Henrietta Maria told him that France’s support for her husband would have cost half as much, and that it would have succeeded. ‘To which,’ she recalled, ‘the cardinal made no reply, but took a hasty leave, showing by his mode of treating me, that he no longer recognized me as a queen, and the daughter of a French monarch.’11

While Henrietta Maria may have said that she considered herself just ‘a poor and wretched widow, in the flood of her miserable emotions’, she busily explored all avenues for retrieving her husband’s lost crown. These included the possibility of hiring the Duke of Lorraine’s forces, or of trusting in the goodwill of Denmark or Sweden. But in the end for various reasons these came to nothing. Ireland and Scotland were left as the most promising springboards for restoring the Stuart cause. The queen and her intimates looked at the Roman Catholicism of the Irish, and the Presbyterianism of the Scottish, and decided the sacrifice of siding with either was a price worth paying, given the magnitude of their ultimate goal.

But the past could not be wished away. Charles I’s rule of Scotland had been poorly judged. He had no first-hand experience of Scottish politics, which were enmeshed in the rigidity of the nation’s Church – the ‘Kirk’ – and in the undulating power of the various noble factions. Nor did he appreciate how the physical absence from Scotland of his father (King James returned to his homeland just once during his twenty-two years on the English throne), and then of himself, had left a power vacuum that had, in large part, been filled by the Kirk.

For its part, the Kirk had supreme confidence in its power, seeing itself as the earthly manager of God’s wishes. It viewed monarchs as royal magistrates, who served a useful purpose but were unworthy of veneration. The Kirk was happy to hold them individually to account for their human fallibility: a sinner was a sinner, no matter how garlanded his family tree.

Charles I believed with equal passion that the Church must be a spiritual reflection of the hierarchical world of which, he felt certain, he was at the social and political summit. He believed in the importance of bishops, regarding them as being, like himself, selected by God. He also viewed them as powerful allies across his kingdoms: ‘the pulpits … teach obedience [to the Crown]’, he wrote in late 1646.12

Charles attempted to impose his High Church beliefs on Scotland during the late 1630s, by insisting on the use of the Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer. His high-handedness brought about the National Covenant in 1638. This was an undertaking by the Kirk, on behalf of the Scottish nation, to adhere to the doctrines previously approved by Scotland’s Parliament, and to reject any religious interference. While the Covenant acknowledged Scotland’s obedience to the Crown, it also warned that, if pushed, the people would fight for their God against their king.

The Covenanters would, essentially, form the government of Scotland from 1638 to 1651, with the 1st Marquess of Argyll – the slight, cross-eyed, redheaded chief of Clan Campbell – as its leading aristocratic light. Charles I had tried to win over Argyll early on, inviting him to London in 1638. During that visit Argyll left the king in no doubt as to his distaste for his religious plans for Scotland. Insulted rather than enlightened, Charles hatched a secret plan for vengeance, approving an invasion of Argyll’s lands by Irish sympathisers who allied with the Campbells’ bitter enemies, the MacDonalds. These low tactics turned Argyll from a man who was merely at odds with the king’s spiritual policies into a livid Covenanter, eager to champion his nation’s religious and political freedoms under one banner.

Another leading Covenanter was the lawyer Sir Archibald Johnston, Lord Wariston, who was powered by intense religious convictions. The loss of Wariston’s first wife in 1633, when he was twenty-two, seems to have pitched him into a terrible place, from which he emerged with an endless appetite for godliness. Wariston would sleep for only three hours a night, passing his long days in bewilderingly drawn-out prayers and meditations. Dinner guests noted one evening that when he said grace, it took him an hour to reach ‘Amen’. While his regular devotions took three hours at a time, he must have surprised even himself when he realised that the prayers he had started at six o’clock one morning had only ended at eight o’clock that evening.

This fanatical piety gained respect amongst other Covenanters, and this readily crossed over into political influence. Wariston’s home, near Mercat Cross in Edinburgh, became the meeting place for the leading members of the Kirk, the night before the opening of each annual General Assembly. There they would agree in advance ‘the choosing of the Moderator, Committees, and chief points of the Assembly’.13

Wariston lent his sharp legal mind to the Kirk as it battled against Charles I’s proposed religious settlement for Scotland. Presbyterianism was, to Wariston, ‘more than all the world’, and ‘he looked on the Covenant as the setting of Christ on His throne’.14 Any who refused to have such beliefs as the cornerstone of their lives must, he argued, be disqualified from public office.

The religious collision between king and Kirk led to the Bishops’ Wars of 1639 and 1640. The Scots invaded England, taking Newcastle and threatening advances further south. The urgent need to settle the wars forced Charles to call England’s Parliament in April 1640, for the first time in eleven years. Though the ‘Short Parliament’ lasted just three weeks, a chain of events had been set in motion that eventually culminated in the English Civil War, as Members of Parliament insisted on having a long list of grievances addressed, while the king asserted his independence from the demands of his subjects. This political conflict was exacerbated by the keenly felt religious principles on both sides.

In 1643, with Royalist victories mounting and the loss of the Civil War looking possible, Parliament sought the Scots’ help. An alliance was sealed through the Solemn League and Covenant. This agreement guaranteed the preservation of Presbyterianism in Scotland, and seemed to the Scots to promise that England and Ireland would fall into line once Charles I had been defeated.

A Scottish civil war took place from 1644 to 1647, between the Covenanters and their Royalist opponents. James, 1st Marquess of Montrose, led the king’s army, a mixture of Scottish clansmen and Irish troops under Alasdair MacColla.

The charismatic Montrose won a string of remarkable victories with his small force. He repeatedly humiliated the Covenanter leader, the Marquess of Argyll, whose ruthlessness was not matched by either military ability or courage.* It was noted how reluctant Argyll was to engage with the Royalist champion. When he did, it did not go well for him.

The climax came at the battle of Inverlochy, near Ben Nevis, in February 1645. Argyll excused himself from the fight, claiming that he had a dislocated shoulder, and elected to watch proceedings from his boat in the nearby loch. From there he witnessed what was to be the bloodiest defeat his clan would ever suffer. Montrose’s significantly outnumbered men cut down 1,500 Campbells. After the battle was lost, Argyll was rowed away to safety.

Montrose’s victorious run was finally brought to an end when he was surprised in heavy mist by a large force under Lieutenant General David Leslie, at Philiphaugh in September 1645. This reverse occurred three months after the main English Royalist army had been trounced at Naseby, and added to the escalating despair in Charles I’s ranks. Montrose, refused a pardon, went into exile in Norway. The English king now seemed to have no Scottish cards left to play.

Despite this, in the spring of 1646, defeated in England and looking for a way forward, Charles I misguidedly handed himself over to the Scots. He had hoped that the allies of his English enemies would now support him, perhaps out of some underlying loyalty to his Stuart blood, but also because he had been fed inaccurate information about the Scots’ attitude to him by the French ambassador to England. The Scots, intrigued but confused by the appearance of their leading opponent in their midst, repeatedly tried to persuade Charles to take the Covenant, explaining that if he did not, they would be unable help him. But the king refused.

Charles had written to Henrietta Maria, earlier that year, saying that he would do anything to get Scottish aid as long as it did not involve him ‘giving up the Church of England, with which I will not part upon any condition whatsoever’.15 While he dug his heels in, citing his unshakeable religious principles, he was also aware of the political importance of his stance: ‘The nature of Presbyterian government is to steal or force the Crown from the king’s head,’ he told Henrietta Maria. ‘For their chief maxim is (and I know it to be true), that all kings must submit to Christ’s kingdom, of which they are the sole governors … so that yielding to the Scots in this particular, I should both go against my conscience and ruin my crown.’16

Henrietta Maria had agreed with her husband’s assessment. She told him, in a letter of October 1646, when the First English Civil War was lost: ‘We must endeavour to have the Scots for us, without nevertheless taking the Covenant, or doing anything which shall be dishonourable … since we have suffered so much, we must resolve to finish with honour.’

The king stuck to his views for several months, with no hint of compromise, leaving the Scots with no choice but to believe him when he said that he was not for turning. They had long made it clear that their God came before their monarch, and in early 1647 they effectively sold him to England’s Parliament, on condition that no harm would come to him – he was, after all, their king too.

There were, though, some moderate Covenanters who were open to a compromise with the king. They were party to ‘the Engagement’, an agreement that was secretly negotiated in December 1647 while Charles was held prisoner by Parliament on the Isle of Wight. Charles guaranteed these Scottish allies a confirmation of the Solemn League and Covenant in London’s Parliament, provided neither he nor any other Englishman was obliged to take the Covenant. There would also be steps towards unification of the two kingdoms, with the Scots being allowed a greater say in the government of England until that plan reached fruition. In return, Charles I was to be rescued from his island imprisonment and taken to London, where a settlement would be forced out of his enemies in Parliament. The main Scottish army would stand poised to invade if the king’s and the Engagers’ demands were rejected.

Argyll, Wariston and the other hardline Covenanters were against any such alliance, because it would compromise their rigid religious beliefs. They felt vindicated when the Engagers’ army was destroyed at the battle of Preston, in August 1648. The Kirk party was now left in control in Scotland. In January 1649 it decreed that any who had agreed to the Engagement must be barred from public office.

The news of the execution of the king at the end of that same month changed everything. It provoked horror throughout Scotland. The Kirk already felt that Parliament had failed to honour its commitment to settle Presbyterianism on England. Now it had also, contrary to its promise, beheaded the Scots’ king.

In Edinburgh on 5 February 1649, six days after Charles I’s execution, Prince Charles was proclaimed king of Scotland, England and Ireland. War with England was from that point inevitable.

While the Covenanters were quick to proclaim the exiled prince ‘King Charles II’, they made it clear that he could not actually rule until he had signed the National Covenant, with its guarantees of religious and political union. The following month a delegation of Covenanters travelled to see Charles in the Netherlands, and presented him with a bundle, carefully bound in one form, containing their demands and creeds, with the Covenant at its core.

Charles was startled by the terms offered. ‘They presented to him three propositions, demanding that he should banish Montrose & all other malignants and evil counselors from his court; that he should take the Covenant himself & establish it through all his dominions; & that he should bring but an hundred persons with him into Scotland, among which there should be none that had bore arms for his late Majesty.’17

Charles’s disappointment at the proposals was aggravated by the attitude of his hosts, the deputies of the various Dutch States, who encouraged him to agree to any terms put forward by the Scots. They knew he had nowhere else to turn, other than to Ireland, and that would involve what was, to them, a deeply troubling alliance with Roman Catholics.

But Charles still had hopes that Ireland could prove to be his saviour, because the Royalists there had allied with a Catholic confederacy to form a significant force. The resulting army, commanded by the Marquess of Ormonde, was busying itself in anticipation of an invasion by England’s New Model Army. After visiting his mother at St-Germain, Charles returned to Jersey in September 1649, ready to cross to Ireland. But by the time he landed on the island, things had changed very much for the worse. For in mid-August Cromwell had landed near Dublin.

Cromwell soon eliminated Ireland as a possible springboard for the Royalists, tearing through inadequate defences and inferior troops, leaving still unforgotten and unforgiven carnage in his wake. By early 1650, Scotland was the only possible source of military help available to Charles. In February he returned from Jersey to the Continent knowing he had a choice: either side with the Scots, or continue in impotent exile.

It was a question of what compromise he could now accept to win over the deeply distrustful Covenanters. For their part, they already knew quite a lot about him. He seemed to be very far removed from the epitome of humility and religious devotion that they might have hoped for.

* Argyll swore by a Latin saying that translated as ‘Dead men don’t bite.’