The White King Read online

  Henrietta Maria’s arrival in The Hague was, meanwhile, greeted with lavish entertainments laid on by her daughter’s father-in-law, Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange. Charles’s sister Elizabeth offered a cooler reception. Her son Charles Louis had been writing home describing Henrietta Maria as a harridan who dominated Charles and was determined on war. Elizabeth was convinced that all her ‘dear brother’s’ problems must stem from his wife. Meanwhile Charles Louis’ siblings reacted unsympathetically to the visible effects on Henrietta Maria of months of illness and weight loss, not to mention the wreck of one of the ships accompanying her to Holland.15 Charles’s niece, Sophie of the Rhine, wrote cruelly of her skinny arms and of loose teeth ‘protruding from her mouth like ravelins from a fortress’. The description is still quoted to imply Henrietta Maria was plain. In fact as soon as she won Sophie round, the girl began to notice that the queen ‘had very beautiful eyes, a well-formed nose and a lovely complexion’.16 Charles had been confident Henrietta Maria’s charm would also ensure that ‘my wife and my sister will be very good friends’.17 And indeed, the Winter Queen admitted that her sister-in-law ‘uses me and my children extremely well’, showing ‘civility and kindness’.18

  Henrietta Maria was in Europe, however, not only for her own safety. She had a job to do. Having smoothed over family relations, Henrietta Maria took up her new role as Charles’s diplomat and party leader in Europe, as well as his arms buyer. The situation in Ireland was, for both sides, now only the pretext for the gathering of arms and men to fight on English home soil. Henrietta Maria had been set a formidable task, and in the Dutch Republic she faced anti-Royalist prejudice. When she tried to sell the royal jewels she had brought with her, obstacles were put in her way. In one of her lost letters to Charles she warned, ‘Dear Heart… can you send me a warrant under your hand, which gives me full power to deal with my jewellery, since the merchants say a woman cannot sell jewellery during the lifetime of her husband.’ The gems included Crown possessions such as the famous Burgundian jewel, the ‘Three Brethren’, a pin of rubies and diamonds that Charles had flaunted in Madrid to dazzle the Spanish in 1623.19 Once they were sold she was confident she could ‘buy gunpowder, arms and cannon here’.20

  Charles responded quickly and a further letter from his wife followed. She had his pearl buttons ‘taken out of their gold setting and made into a chain’. It proved a great success: ‘You cannot imagine how pretty your pearls were.’ Nevertheless the dealers in Breda struck a hard bargain. The buttons went for half what they were worth.21 As she began using the money to buy arms, she also deployed her political skills to undermine Parliament’s efforts to gain European support for their cause. In a further lost letter Henrietta Maria informs the French foreign minister Chavigny that ‘The English rebels, under the name of Parliament’, had sent an agent to Holland, claiming that ‘the king and I’ wanted to re-establish Catholicism in England: ‘I hear they have also sent an agent to France on the same pretext of religion. Whoever he is I hope he will not be heard nor received, since he comes from rebels against God and against their king.’22 In a later letter she thanks Chavigny for ‘the services you give me’.23 What kind of services is indicated a few months later when she thanks him for stopping a shipment of ‘arms prepared for the rebels’.24

  Charles arrived in York on 19 March with the Prince of Wales and a mere thirty or forty gentlemen. He accepted that he had to agree to many of the new restrictions that Parliament had placed on him if he was to gather recruits. In the meantime, there was a truly grim decision to be made. After the scaremongering about Catholics hiding in houses in York at Christmas, he needed to reassure the frightened townsfolk that he was committed to protecting them from a popish conspiracy. This necessitated his lifting a stay of execution on a local Catholic priest. The unfortunate man was hanged, drawn and quartered on 13 April, along with another priest, a native-born Yorkshireman aged eighty-seven.25 At least the man was guilty of the crime of which he was convicted–albeit only of being a priest and being in England.

  In the shadow of these deaths Charles planned the annual Garter feast. A glittering march-past of Charles’s knights was intended to be an affirmation of the loyalty and companionship of his leading nobles, a theatrical reminder of the ethos of order and a projection of the mystery of royal power.26 Only four knights came. It did achieve one thing, however: the arrival of James, Duke of York, for his election to the Order, escorted by the Marquess of Hertford, and upwards of 900 horse.27 This marked a decisive break between Hertford and his brother-in-law, Essex, with whom he had always been close. Many friendships and families were beginning to see similar divisions. But Charles needed to do much more to recruit Royalists. His next move was to advertise his role as the true guardian of the law against radicals who were bringing disorder and terror to England.

  The Junto-controlled Parliament had issued an order, without the necessary royal consent, for the munitions kept in Hull since the second Bishops’ War now to be moved to London.28 Henrietta Maria urged Charles to act quickly and seize the magazine for his future army. His hopes of compromise made him vacillate, and she warned him, ‘You should never take half-measures. This is what you have always done, started well and continued badly.’29 She had a point. Charles was attracted to adventurous exploits, but the considered, scholarly side of his nature, and dislike of violence, also made him draw back. The result was that while he was open to suggestions of bold action, he had often proved not to have the ruthlessness to take personal charge or to follow through the consequences. On this occasion, however, Charles’s restraint had solid reasoning behind it.

  Charles hoped to create a theatrical scene that would make it clear the Junto had committed an act of rebellion. He ignored his wife’s call to take soldiers to fight for the magazine and instead, on 22 April 1642, two days after the Garter ceremonies were finished, he sent James to Hull. There the eight-year-old, boasting his new George, politely informed the governor, Sir John Hotham, that the king was approaching and expected to be granted entry. Hotham greeted the little Duke of York in Parliament’s name with ‘every demonstration of respect’, but when the king appeared he refused him entry. This was out-and-out treason.

  On 30 April Charles asked the Yorkshire gentry for their aid in defending his person and that ‘he may be vindicated in his honour’.30 On 12 May he issued a further call to arms. ‘You see that my magazine is going to be taken from me (being my own goods) directly against my will… I have thought it fit to have a guard that I may be able to protect you, the laws, and the true Protestant profession.’ In this he required their ‘concurrence and assistance’.31

  As recruits began to flock to the Royalist cause in York, Charles issued resolutions announcing the disarming of all Catholics, reiterated his commitment to ‘true religion’, and his openness to discussing all disputed matters. Personal letters were also sent out to every peer, commanding each on his allegiance to offer his counsel. A steady stream of noblemen duly began to head north. Then the Junto helped the king further by taking a false step. Charles was presented by Parliament with nineteen Propositions to which he had to agree if civil war was to be avoided. If accepted, these Propositions would have reduced him to the status of a puppet king, without the right even to supervise his own children. What Charles called their ‘horrible novelty’ antagonised moderate opinion and his official ‘Answer’ in June became a major propaganda victory.32 It warned that Parliament had become an ‘upstart authority’ and that it was moving to destroy the constitutional balance by usurping royal powers. If the king were left undefended, the entire social order would collapse ‘into a dark equal chaos of confusion’.

  Multiple editions of Charles’s ‘Answer’ were printed and given wide circulation. It tapped into a deep vein of anxiety that power had tipped into the hands of an oligarchy that was working hand in glove with extremists. This anxiety had, furthermore, a basis in fact. The leading oppositionists were dependent for their lives and politica
l programme on the Presbyterian Scots and the radicals of the London mass movement. The majority of the political nation did not hold radical or Presbyterian views and were horrified at the explosion of extremist religious literature seen over the last year since the abolition in the summer of 1641 of the Court of Star Chamber, which had addressed cases of sedition. In terms of church structure the maximum most envisaged was a ‘lowered’, or less powerful, episcopacy, not its removal. They were now ready to defend the king and the Church of England against attack by Presbyterians, Independent Congregationalists and the wilder fringes of Protestantism represented by the sectarians.

  Petitions in support of episcopacy began to be issued in the counties and a new sense of optimism took hold around the king. Charles and his sons were described as ‘well and cheerful, the court full of lords, many of the House of Commons and multitude of other brave gentlemen’.33

  By July only about a third of MPs and a quarter of peers were attending Parliament.34 As Charles had highlighted, it scarcely looked like a legal body. Nevertheless, Holland, Warwick and Essex were successfully raising large sums of money for Parliament’s army.35 Emigrants were also returning home from the Puritan colonies to help in the regime change. Amongst them was Warwick’s bibulous protégé Hugh Peter, who had spent six years in New England serving as a minister in Salem and overseer of Harvard College. Such ‘Americans’ found it was ‘a notion of mighty great and high respect to have been a New English man’. They were welcomed to serve as MPs, clergymen and soldiers.36 A constitutional revolution in the City of London government had, meanwhile, seen the lower house gain power over the upper, and the Royalist lord mayor sent for trial.37 For opponents of the regime, London had become a place of fear. Half the judges were jailed, along with many Royalist laymen, ministers and bishops.

  As they prepared for war, the Junto justified acting against the king–which was how treason was defined–by using the theory of the ‘king’s two bodies’. This made a distinction between the physical body of the king (which might be incapacitated) and the Crown as a body of authority. According to their argument Parliament, as the highest court, had the right to act on Charles’s behalf, as it might if he were insane. This did not have the rallying quality of the Royalist appeals to loyalty to their king. But the Junto could, and did, continue to mine the atrocity stories from Ireland.* It was ironic that the 10,000 men raised to defend the Protestant settlers in Ireland were to be used instead against the king. But then the popish threat was, supposedly, threatening England itself.

  For English Catholics the Junto’s jabbing at religious and ethnic prejudice had terrifying consequences. Their houses and goods were being plundered by mobs and there were further hangings, drawings and quarterings of priests. Near Dorchester, one tortured cleric was left alive for half an hour during his disembowelment. ‘His forehead was bathed in sweat and blood and water flowed from his eyes and nose,’ a witness reported. A woman watching as pieces of his liver were being extracted begged for him to be put out of his misery. When at last he was, his decapitated head was used as a football in the crowd.38

  Essex was now named as Parliament’s Lord General. Although the fifty-one-year-old’s military career in Europe had ended seventeen years earlier, with him holding the rank of a mere colonel, his father’s name still held its magnetic force. The legend of the ‘valiant knight of chivalry’, who had fallen victim to royal injustice under Elizabeth I, lived on in his son who had a stoical authority and attracted a large popular following. Indeed, one Parliamentarian later asserted that if he ‘had refused that command our cause in all likelihood [would have] sunk’.39

  Warwick was also a key figure in gaining Parliament military power. After Essex, he was England’s premier fighting lord, and had almost single-handedly carried the fight to the Spanish in the Americas for over two decades. Many sailors were attracted to his reputation, and when he appeared at the Downs naval base at Chatham in north Kent on the river Medway, all but five of the royal ships came over to him immediately. That night he persuaded a sixth captain to join them. The following day Warwick besieged the remaining four ships. He described to Pym how he fired cannon shot over the last two holdouts and then sent a message saying, ‘I had turned up the glass upon them.’ When the sand ran out their time was up. He attacked, the ships were boarded and their captains arrested.40 Warwick had thus successfully seized control of the navy for Parliament.

  Both sides were now recruiting for their armies across England and Wales. Towns and villages everywhere saw ‘fierce contests and disputes’.41 The term ‘Cavalier’ was used as an insult to conjure images of popish caballeros while ‘Roundhead’ associated Parliament with Puritans who kept their hair ‘close round their heads with so many little peaks as was something ridiculous to behold’.42 The corporation of Coventry was amongst those that strove to remain neutral, and the ordinary people of north Devon refused even the most diligent recruitment efforts. People were certain that the war would begin and end with one great battle, as had so often been the case during the Wars of the Roses. There was no desire to commit when it would soon emerge who the victor was to be.

  There was, furthermore, no profound ethnic or religious hatred amongst the people of England and Wales, despite the narrative of a popish threat. The numbers of Catholics were too few. This was to be a war of Protestant against Protestant over the nature of the Church of England, and where the balance of power between king and Parliament should lie in a ‘mixed’ monarchy. Neither Royalists nor Parliamentarians held a homogeneous view on the outcome they desired. As, gradually, the kingdom began to splinter, so each side held within it the certainty of further splits that would see Royalist turn on Royalist, and Parliamentarian on Parliamentarian.43 The question was, would moderates win, or something extreme?

  Charles’s cause was slowed by his desire to demonstrate his reluctance to make war. The ‘king is content to look on quietly, and to tread the path of peace’, one royal servant had observed in June.44 It was a risky strategy. Parliament was already strongest in the richest and most populous regions of London and the south-east, of East Anglia, and much of the south and east Midlands.45 But in August Charles at last ordered his supporters to rally to his standard at Nottingham Castle.* Charles Louis promptly deserted his uncle to sail for Holland. He would later issue a public call for Charles to reconcile with Parliament and condemn his younger brothers Rupert and Maurice of the Rhine, who landed in England to join the king’s cause just as he left.46

  It was raining when, at six in the evening on 22 August, Charles’s sons the Prince of Wales and James, Duke of York, rode with their father up the hill at Nottingham Castle, to raise his standard. The cloth was pennant-shaped and cloven at the outer edge. It was sewn with an image of the king’s heraldic arms, along with a bloody hand pointing to a crown and the words ‘Give Caesar his due’.47 This allusion to Christ’s instruction to ‘render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s’ was a reminder of a subject’s duty of obedience to a king’s divinely sanctioned authority. It must, nevertheless, rank as one of history’s least inspiring rallying cries. Raised against a dark sky, the cloth hung limp from a blood-red pole, the rain lashing down as the drums rolled. The standard was planted in the ground, trumpets blasted, and 1,000 Cavaliers cried out, ‘God save the king.’

  In The Hague, Henrietta Maria pronounced herself happier with events than she had been in two years. She had sent Charles powder, muskets, pistols and carbines, field pieces and cash for the battle ahead. Victory would be theirs, and ‘Hay then! Down go they!’48 She and her ‘Dear Heart’ would be together in ‘a month’, she assured him.49

  But in Nottingham, Charles’s face looked stricken.

  The Royalist commander Sir Henry Slingsby had, like the king, glimpsed the horrors ahead. ‘Neither one nor the other can expect to see advantage by this war,’ he predicted; ‘the remedy will prove worse than the disease.’50

  * In June Ireland’s Catholic leaders had formed a Confeder
ation 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.

  * 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.

  15

  EDGEHILL

  THE TOWN OF WORCESTER AND THE COUNTRY AROUND IT IS ‘SO papistical, atheistical, and abominable, that it resembles Sodom and is the very emblem of Gomorrah’.1 That, at least, was the judgement of one Roundhead. His brothers in arms should, therefore, have been on the lookout for trouble when they reached Wick Field by Powick Bridge on 23 September 1642. Instead they blundered into a troop of Royalist cavalry under Prince Rupert of the Rhine. Aged twenty-two and over six feet tall, Rupert had, it was said, the face of an angel and the temper of a demon. But it was his younger brother, the strapping twenty-one-year-old Prince Maurice, who promptly shot a Roundhead dead. In the ensuring melee the princes both received cuts to the head before the Roundheads were overcome. Around 150 were killed, and some of the wounded were finished off with daggers and their bodies mutilated.2

  Rupert was a child of the Thirty Years War and already an aggressive soldier. He had fought against the Habsburgs under the Calvinist Prince of Orange from the age of thirteen, and at nineteen was a prisoner of war. He had been released the previous year ‘in perfect health, but lean and weary’.3 He had with him a rare large white hunting poodle called Boy: a gift of the Royalist Earl of Arundel from the litter of a bitch known as Puddle.4 Rupert had sworn not to fight the Habsburgs again as a condition of his release, and since soldiering was his only business, he had come England with Boy and Maurice to fight for his uncle. Rupert’s years on the battlefield had left him with little courtly polish, but Charles had given him command of the horse and the most energetic and talented Cavaliers had flocked to take service with him. Within weeks of his appointment Rupert’s cavalry was 2,500 strong, in an army of 12,500. At Powick Bridge his reputation amongst Cavaliers was sealed.