The White King Read online

  On 22 November, with Charles still a few days from London, the debate on the Grand Remonstrance opened in the Commons. It was met with ferocious opposition.20 MPs complained that Charles had already answered so many grievances that it was ‘unseasonable’ to now welcome him home from Edinburgh with a ‘volume of reproaches for what others had done and he himself had reformed’.21 The Remonstrance was passed by a mere eleven votes, and at 2 a.m. when most MPs were in bed. Later that morning another row erupted over whether it should be published. This would be a blatant act of troublemaking. ‘I did not dream that we would demonstrate downwards, tell stories to the people and talk of the king as of a third person,’ one MP observed with disgust.22 An interim decision was made for the Remonstrance to be released in manuscript, rather than printed.

  On 24 November, Charles reached Theobalds just outside London. Henrietta Maria had gathered a large greeting party that included an impressive array of loyal peers as well as their elder sons. The next day they all accompanied the king towards London. Four miles from the City Charles was met by the lord mayor and his aldermen, along with 600 other leading citizens, all on horse and dressed magnificently. The mayor presented Charles with the keys of the City and Charles delivered a speech. He blamed the riots earlier in the year on the ‘meaner’ sort, and vowed to protect the Protestant religion. He and the princes then mounted horses and rode into the City.

  The church bells pealed and fountains ran with wine while Charles ‘was received everywhere with universal acclamations’. He responded with ‘gestures and speech’, causing the crowds to erupt in ‘a renewal of the shouts of welcome’.23 At the Guildhall, the aldermen had laid on a feast and, afterwards, the king and queen were escorted to Whitehall by torchlight, the crowds roaring their approval. In the old tilt yard by the palace hundreds of mounted cavaliers awaited Charles, illuminated by tapers, and when the king entered the gates they cried out, ‘The Lord preserve King Charles.’24

  That same day Essex’s command as Lord General of the southern army lapsed, as did Holland’s command of the army north of the Trent. Charles had promoted them to these roles in the hopes of gaining their goodwill. But he was no longer willing to try and buy the Junto’s favours. The king’s next move would be to take control of the army needed for Ireland.

  With the peace treaty signed in Edinburgh the English army had been disbanded. It would have been a relatively simple matter to recruit it again to fight the Irish. But the soldiers viewed the Junto as traitors and so the Junto wanted instead to raise an army of pressed men–that is, draftees–to be led by their own hand-picked officers. To achieve this they first needed to pass an impressment bill. Charles was determined to mobilise Royalists in Parliament to stop them.

  The king’s party had a majority in the Lords, thanks to the presence of the bishops, while in the Commons the Junto’s majority was reliant on intimidation: moderates had been kept away by the mobs. Charles had to persuade these moderates back. To do so, on 12 December Charles issued a proclamation summoning ‘all members of both Houses of Parliament’ to return to Westminster by royal command on or before 12 January 1642. With moderates obliged to attend under this order, Pym’s claims to represent the people would be exposed as a sham. Already his pretentions to power had earned him the mocking sobriquet ‘King Pym’. It was time to bring his reign to an end.

  But 12 January was a month away.

  The City radicals were still churning out pamphlets filled with tales from Ireland of babies on pikes and of Protestant families burned in their homes.25 Those who could not read heard similar stories broadcast from Puritan pulpits. The exaggerated numbers of victims quoted by Puritan ministers at times surpassed the entire Protestant population of Ireland.26 When Pym’s Remonstrance, with its depiction of an England in the grip of a Counter-Reformation takeover bid, was now printed and circulated, the scaremongering was spread far beyond London. In York, the future Parliamentarian general Sir Thomas Fairfax wrote to his father at Westminster, describing how he was living in terror of Catholics hiding in homes all over York, poised to take advantage of the Christmas season, when ‘joviality and security chase away fear’, to attack ordinary folk when they least expected it.27

  Meanwhile, back in Westminster, pressure was being maintained on MPs by mobs of ‘factious citizens’ who descended on Parliament ‘with their swords by their sides, hundreds in companies’. The atmosphere in London grew still more violent as the capital filled up in turn with cavaliers. One day there were blows at Whitehall between ‘citizens carrying clubs and swords’, shouting abuse outside the gates, and ‘gentlemen of the Court, who went over the rails striking at them with drawn swords’.28 On 27 December the Archbishop of York, John Williams, a moderate Calvinist and former friend to the Junto, got out of his coach at Westminster only to have to fight off thugs with his fists. It had become unsafe for bishops to attend the Lords. This removed the Royalist majority in the Upper House and, as moderate MPs had not yet answered Charles’s summons to attend Parliament, the Junto retained its majority in the Commons. They were free to push through any bills they wanted.

  Archbishop Williams urgently petitioned the king for a suspension of parliamentary business, arguing that without the bishops the Lords were not fully constituted. The Junto-packed Commons promptly had ten of the twelve bishop petitioners arrested for treason and incarcerated in the Tower.29 Charles’s last powers could now be dismantled long before 12 January when moderate MPs would return to Parliament. Charles made a last-ditch effort to reach out to his enemies, offering Pym the coveted post of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Pym turned him down.

  Something drastic now had to be done if Charles was not to risk becoming a puppet king. He decided to use the familiar process of impeachment to charge six of the Junto with treason, such ‘as stirring up the apprentices to tumultuous petitioning’. Five were members of the Commons: John Pym, Sir Arthur Hesilrige, Denzil Holles, John Hampden and a fanatic called William Strode. The one peer, Viscount Mandeville, was Warwick’s son-in-law. Warwick himself and the other great peers were to be left until Charles was in a stronger position. Meanwhile, Charles hoped the impeachment proceedings would clog up parliamentary business until the vital 12 January date.

  On Monday 3 January the Attorney General duly presented the House of Lords with the impeachment articles. The Lords would then usually have moved to examine witnesses, as they had with Strafford. Instead, they appointed a committee to decide if the charges were lawful. When the serjeant-at-arms arrived at the Commons to arrest the five members, he was turned away. The Junto then went on the attack, striking as close to the king as they dared.30

  That night news reached Charles that Parliament was to deprive the queen of most of her household clergy. Henrietta Maria believed this was the prelude to her own arrest. A whispering campaign had been building, accusing her of seeking ‘to overthrow the laws and religion of the kingdom’. It was said, furthermore, that a ‘queen was only a subject’: as such she could be tried and executed as other queen consorts had been before her.31

  At 10 p.m. Charles ordered that the cannon at the Tower be armed and made ready to overawe the capital. London was eerily quiet the next morning. Then, at three o’clock in the afternoon, Charles suddenly emerged from his quarters at Whitehall. He called out to the multitude of armed Royalist gentry who were standing around: ‘Follow me, my most loyal liege men and soldiers.’ As they walked behind him he strode out of the palace and commandeered a carriage off a man in the street. He asked to be taken to Parliament. With him went his nephew, Charles Louis, and the seventy-year-old Earl of Roxburghe. The Scottish peer had been urging Charles to intervene directly. Charles Louis was a more reluctant companion. Charles had kept his nephew, and potential replacement, at his side so that the prince would be associated with his action.

  MPs may have ignored the arrest warrant for the five members delivered by Charles’s serjeant-at-arms, but Charles was certain they could not also ignore an order from h
is own mouth. And that was what he now intended to deliver.

  As Charles’s carriage rumbled towards Westminster, Henrietta Maria assured Lucy Carlisle that the king was poised to reclaim his realm, ‘for Pym and his confederates are arrested before now’.32 Henrietta Maria had feared that unless the five members were imprisoned, she would be forced to flee England for her own safety. She had warned Charles the previous night, ‘pull those rogues out by the ears–or never see my face more!’33 What she did not know was that Lucy had then betrayed her, sending a message to an MP friend–possibly Pym–that a plan was being laid against the five members, although she had not known what it was.34

  Now, as the king’s carriage continued down the street followed by 400–500 armed men, a soldier who had served in Buckingham’s disastrous French campaign asked what was happening. When he was told, he squeezed past the cavaliers and ran ahead to warn the Commons.

  With the soldier’s warning delivered, the five members were asked to leave the Chamber to avoid ‘combustion in the House’. Strode tried to stay, but a friend dragged him out. At that same moment the king entered New Palace Yard, just outside Westminster Hall. Charles’s cavaliers entered the hall first and lined up on either side of the long room in order for the king to pass between them. The MPs sitting in the Commons Chamber then heard the clatter as the king came up the stairs followed by his men. Charles entered the Commons alone, to stunned silence. The five members were by now hiding in the neighbouring Court of the King’s Bench. The MPs who remained seated could see old Roxburghe behind the king, holding open the door to the stairs and a crush of soldiers beyond. One held a pistol in his hand, already cocked. A twitch of a finger and MPs’ blood would spill on the Commons floor.

  Charles walked centre stage to the Speaker’s Chair and addressed his MPs. He requested the five members be given up, looking around hoping to spot where they were. ‘I do not see any of them,’ he said, ‘I think I should know them.’35 The birds had flown and there was nothing left to do but leave. The humiliation of his position was evident. As Charles walked out the silence gave way to shouts of ‘Privilege! Privilege!’, the thunderous voices pursuing him down the stairs.36

  A petition was delivered to the king from the City Council on 7 January, informing Charles that the fears prompted by the rebellion in Ireland ‘were exceedingly increased by His Majesty’s late going into the House of Commons, attended by a great multitude of armed men’. They saw the potential ‘ruin of the Protestant religion, and the lives and liberties of all his subjects’. The action Charles had taken had proved disastrous. As one Royalist recalled sadly, ‘All that [the Junto] had ever said of plots and conspiracies against Parliament, which had before been laughed at, [was] now thought true and real.’37 Henrietta Maria was blamed for the attempted arrests, and her life was left at even greater risk than before.

  Charles, fearing for the safety of his wife and children, informed the Junto that the royal family would leave London. Holland and Essex tried to persuade Charles to stay, while Lucy Carlisle spoke to Henrietta Maria. Lucy was now open in her support for the Junto, to whom she had for some time been communicating ‘all she knew and more of the dispositions of the king and queen’.38 Lucy had always liked winners, and in common with Holland she was dismayed by Charles’s new poverty. England’s purse strings now seemed to be in the hands of the Junto. She may also have felt Strafford had betrayed her. She had learned he had profited personally to the tune of thousands of pounds after persuading her to sell vast tracts of her Irish lands to the king.

  In any event, Henrietta Maria was not inclined to listen to the advice of her treacherous lady-in-waiting. Later when the queen helped pick code names for the king’s party, using their enemies’ names to confuse those who intercepted their post, Henrietta Maria chose for herself the code name ‘Carlisle’: a mark of her contempt for her former favourite, now turned foe. Charles too was angered by the ‘ingratitude of those’ who ‘having eaten of our bread and being enriched with our bounty have scornfully lift themselves up against us’.39 Holland’s desertion was particularly painful for the king: he was a fellow Knight of the Garter, a former Captain of the Guard and Groom of the Stool, as well as a long-standing friend of the queen. Yet Holland’s advice was worth listening to. Abandoning London, the ‘seat and centre’ of Charles’s empire, was to prove a major error.

  The royal family left Whitehall on Monday 10 January, travelling by barge to Hampton Court, with few courtiers but a large number of officers from the disbanded English army.40 A Royalist saw the King of England arrive in a ‘most disconsolate, perplexed condition, in more need of comfort and counsel than they had ever known him’.41 It was icy cold at Hampton Court and there were few beds made up. Charles, Henrietta Maria and the children slept together. There was surely some comfort in the warmth of their bodies against each other on that January night. Soon they would be separated forever.

  * 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.

  Part Three

  HIS TURNCOAT SERVANT

  14

  ‘GIVE CAESAR HIS DUE’

  AS CHARLES SAID FAREWELL TO HENRIETTA MARIA AT DOVER ON 23 February 1642 it seemed he ‘did not know how to tear himself away from her’.1 He had banished bishops from the Lords and signed the impressment bill so that she would be permitted to accompany their daughter Mary to The Hague. Nevertheless it was hard to see her go. He stood ‘conversing with her in sweet discourse and affectionate embraces’, neither of them able to ‘restrain their tears’.2 ‘Pray God for me,’ Henrietta Maria asked a friend, ‘there is not a more wretched creature in this world than me separated from the lord my king, my children and my country.’3 It was nearly seventeen years since she had arrived as a child bride from France, and England was now her home. As her ship sailed away, Charles rode along the shore, waving his hat until the mast disappeared from view and he was ‘left to his loneliness’.4

  The youngest of the royal children–Henry, aged nineteen months, and Elizabeth, aged seven–were installed under the care of Parliament at St James’s Palace. They had lost not only their mother and Mary, but also their governess, the Countess of Roxburghe, who was to care for Mary in Holland. It was evident that the elder princes also ‘grieved at the going away of their mother and sister’.5 On 9 March, the Prince of Wales wrote to tell Mary his news in a few ‘sad lines’.

  The prince was now in Newmarket where their father was ‘much disconsolate and troubled’.6 Henry Holland had arrived and had handed the king a declaration which referred to ‘advertisements’ in foreign parts that Charles had ‘great designs in hand for the altering of religion and the breaking of the neck of your Parliament’. Briefly the king’s iron self-control had snapped: ‘That’s false!’ he had shouted. ‘’Tis a lie!’ He feared more ‘for the true Protestant profession, my people and laws than for my own rights or safety’.7 The prince assured his sister that despite everything, their father’s small band of followers were ‘as we may, merry; and more than we would sad, in respect we cannot alter the present distempers of these troublesome times’. They were now set for York, the second city of the kingdom, ‘to see the event or sequel of these bad unpropitious beginnings’.8

  The Prince Palatine, Charles Louis, complained to his mother, the Winter Queen, that he would have to sell a diamond garter to pay his own travel expenses.9 He was most unused to putting his hand in his pocket, but there was no avoiding it. The king was so poor, one courtier wrote to his wife, that some nights he had no wine, some nights no candles, and ‘he cannot feed them that follow him’. The courtier pitied a monarch ‘so friendless yet without one noted vice’. The trouble was, he believed, Charles was too ‘good-natured’. Charles’s last-dit
ch efforts to offer Pym the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer had looked like weakness. ‘If he had been of a rougher and more imperious nature, he would have found more respect and duty,’ another Royalist ventured.10 Charles himself concurred: ‘Had I yielded less, I had been opposed less, had I denied more, I had been more obeyed.’11

  Before leaving Newmarket, Charles met Holland again. The earl headed a delegation from Parliament and had been picked for his diplomatic skills, as well as his knowledge of the king. His brief was to persuade Charles to reverse his refusal to cede control of the militia to the Junto. This was England’s only peacetime force, raised on behalf of the king by the Lord Lieutenants of the counties in times of military need. Holland’s wheedling got him nowhere. Parliament was asking things of him, Charles said, ‘that were never asked of a king, and with which I will not trust my wife and children’. As king, it was for him alone to lead the fight against the rebels in Ireland. Parliament may have beggared him, but, he declared emphatically, ‘I can find money for that!’12

  Charles had always prided himself on his ability to control his emotions under pressure. Now, ‘lost in the eye of the world… and in the love and affections of his people’, his reign had reached a nadir and his anger was visceral.13 As Charles and his small train of followers set off for York, they stopped at Cambridge. Women threw stones and shouted at him to return to his Parliament. ‘Poor king,’ another of his subjects wrote, ‘he grows still more in slight and contempt here every day.’14