The White King Read online

  Fairfax was ordered by Parliament to avenge Leicester. His army of 14,000 outnumbered Charles’s forces by at least 5,000 men, and Cromwell had again been given command of Fairfax’s cavalry. But the king viewed what Royalists referred to as the ‘New Noddle Army’ with contempt. It was made up from units of the former Parliamentarian armies of the Earl of Essex, the Eastern Association (which had been under the command of the Earl of Manchester) and the Southern Association (formerly under Sir William Waller). In addition there were pressed men from Parliamentarian-held areas. The reforms had cleared out the old leadership, but there were rumours the New Model Army’s morale was poor. The soldier Sir Samuel Luke, writing on 9 June, thought it ‘the bravest for bodies of men, horse and arms, so far as the common soldiers, as ever I saw in my life’: but many of the officers were inexperienced, and he worried that you could barely tell them apart from their men.16

  On 14 June 1645, Charles received news that Fairfax’s army had been spotted close to his headquarters in Market Harborough, Leicestershire. With their smaller force, the best chance for the Royalists was to attack early so catching the enemy off guard before sweeping them from the field with maximum ferocity.17 With this in mind Rupert deployed the main body of the Royalist army on Dust Hill, facing the Northamptonshire village of Naseby. The Royalist cavalry was in the wings, infantry in the middle, with a reserve line of two infantry regiments.

  The battle began at about 10 a.m., ‘the first charge being given by Prince Rupert, with his own and Prince Maurice’s troop’–the right wing of the cavalry. They rode ‘with incredible valour and fury’ and routed at least two of the cavalry regiments they confronted.18 They then wheeled round to hit the enemy right wing in the rear–only to find around 3,000 New Model pikemen and musketeers blocking their path. Rupert was trapped and so unable to order up the reserves. Meanwhile, the Royalist cavalry in the left wing was in a struggle against overwhelming odds. They stood their ground although ‘outfronted and outpoured by their assailants’ until ‘still more [Roundheads] came up to their ranks and put them to the rout’.19

  Charles, seeing Cromwell’s cavalry riding in pursuit of the broken Royalist left wing, moved to lead a countercharge. It put him in a direct line of fire from Fairfax’s regiment of foot. The Earl of Carnwath* grabbed the bridle of the king’s horse and, swearing several full-blooded Scottish oaths, warned, ‘Will you go upon your death in an instant?’20 With Charles’s horse abruptly pulled up, the entire charge juddered to a halt. Orders were shouted out for the men to turn right. They turned, only to face a vast force of Roundheads. They turned again in panic and fled, galloping hard ‘upon the spur, as if they were every man to shift for himself’.21

  With confusion and flight on the right, the Royalist infantry in the middle was inflicting heavy casualties on the New Model Army. Unfortunately, with neither Rupert nor Charles present to give orders, the reserve lines never moved forward. The infantry were worn down by sheer weight of numbers and Cromwell used his cavalry reserves to complete the Royalist defeat.22 The ensign of the last regiment to resist was killed by Fairfax with his own hand.23

  Charles and Rupert tried to rally their broken troops, but it was too late. There was not a Royalist left on the battlefield who was not a prisoner or dead by one o’clock that afternoon. Charles had been in the heart of the action and the bodies lay ‘most thick on the hill the king’s men stood on’.24 The remnant of his army was now in flight, the king among them, riding hard towards Leicester. When Charles found his escape blocked by soldiers on the county boundary, he charged his horse across a small brook, dashed through ranks of surprised Roundheads–and got away by the skin of his teeth.

  Elsewhere, in a field between Naseby and the village of East Farndon, the 500 or so women who rode with the baggage trains of the Royalist army were less fortunate. Unarmed and on foot, they were being slaughtered.

  Between 100 and 400 women were killed at Naseby. The rest were mutilated, their faces cut into ‘the whore’s mask’, noses slit and mouths slashed. This was not part of a general massacre.25 Only these non-combatants–the laundry women, the wives and lovers of the Royalist soldiers–were treated without mercy.

  Since the beginning of the civil war Parliament’s pamphleteers had claimed that popish Irish and Welsh whores were following the king’s army in large numbers, that they carried knives and that some were witches.26 The stories about Boy had heightened interest in the occult. Now racism and religious hatred had come together to find full expression. The parliamentary press, reporting on the massacre, observed that the women had had their just deserts. They had ‘cruel countenances’, and were paying for the humiliation of the parliamentary camp followers in Cornwall, who had been robbed of their clothes.

  The camp followers at Naseby were not, however, the only women to be murdered in large numbers that summer. Three days later the events of another mass killing would be set in train. Thirty-six people–the vast majority of them women–were tried for witchcraft at the assizes in Essex. They were the weak, the frail, the unconventional, those who had made enemies and had no powerful defenders. Nearly half were in their sixties. Although there was no concerted policy against witches either by Parliament or its leading supporters, the Earl of Warwick, whose interests dominated this area, appears to have done nothing to stop this breakdown in public order. The mob was given its head. Only one of those accused of witchcraft would be found innocent, and eighteen were hanged on one afternoon. In total about a hundred ‘witches’ would die in 1645: more than had died on such charges thus far in the whole of English history.

  Meanwhile, on 21 June 1645, a week after Naseby, the captured Royalist soldiers were being paraded through London escorted by the Green and Yellow regiments of the London trained bands. Fairfax had destroyed Charles’s principal field army outside the west. While the king licked his wounds at Raglan Castle in Wales, the New Model Army now marched into the west. On 10 July they defeated the king’s main field army there at the Battle of Langport, south of Bristol. A different kind of blow then followed.

  A parliamentary newspaper reported that the capture of the king’s correspondence at Naseby had proved more valuable to Parliament than ‘all the wealth and soldiers that we took’.27 Around 200 letters had been gathered, including many between Charles and Henrietta Maria. Often Charles’s letters to her concerned matters of state, but all were infused with the language of love. She was his ‘Dear Heart’ and he was ‘eternally’ hers. Thirty-seven letters had been carefully chosen for translation and transcription. These were now published, with commentary, under the prurient title The King’s Cabinet Opened. This exposed what was, supposedly, the king’s darkest secret: proof that he, and not his ‘evil councillors’, was responsible for policy, and that he, in turn, was the vassal of a foreign, Catholic wife.

  Henrietta Maria was depicted in The King’s Cabinet Opened as a transgender perversion of nature, with the official commentary pointing to shocking examples of her mannishness during the civil war, such as when ‘you see she marcheth at the head of an army and calls herself the Generalissima!’ Those letters from Henrietta Maria in which she wrote of wishing only to serve her husband were excluded from The King’s Cabinet Opened. Those that referred to Charles’s concern about her poor health were carefully edited of such material. The information Charles had been sent regularly from France about his wife’s desperate illness had made him protective.28 His criticisms of her ideas were thus always made obliquely; where he agreed with her he did so ringingly–and such endorsements were underscored in Parliament’s commentary: ‘It is plain’, the commentary ran, ‘that the king’s councils are wholly managed by the queen.’ Particularly damaging for Charles was the material that suggested he might agree to his wife’s wish that he allow his Catholic subjects the free practice of their religion.29 ‘This’, one parliamentary journalist wrote, ‘is the Dear Heart which hath cost him almost three Kingdoms.’ Here was ‘the true controller of the breeches’.
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br />   Charles’s public reaction to The King’s Cabinet Opened was less one of embarrassment, however, than of disgust. It was ‘barbarous’ to publish his private letters for public view. They had lost ‘that reputation for civility and humanity which ought to be paid to all men’. He, on the other hand, had lost only his papers. These offered nothing for him to be ashamed of, as good people would judge, for ‘bees gather honey where the spider sucks poison’.30 Royalists concurred, noting that Henrietta Maria had done nothing that did not ‘befit a wife’. It was natural for women to advise their husbands, and as the wife to an English king, and mother to the heir to the English throne, she was, effectively, English. But this was Royalist bravado. There were many more spiders sucking poison from the letters than bees finding honey.31

  The success of Parliament’s propaganda, built as it was on deep-rooted gender and religious prejudices, would be long-lasting. Henrietta Maria still remains in much popular memory the hysterical and domineering wife depicted in The King’s Cabinet Opened, and even responsible for the loss of Charles’s kingdoms.

  Charles’s leading general, Prince Rupert, accepted that the recent battlefield defeats meant the king could no longer hope to win the war. He advised Charles to begin negotiations for peace. Charles refused, angrily. He was well aware, he told Rupert, that ‘there is no probability but of my ruin’. He would not, however, agree to any terms against ‘the defence of my religion, crown and friends’. He reminded Rupert that ‘as a Christian I must tell you that God will not suffer rebels to prosper, or this cause to be overthrown’.32 He still firmly believed God would grant ultimate victory to his cause, although he accepted this might come after his own death, either in battle or by assassination. ‘It is very fit for me now to prepare for the worst,’ he wrote to his heir. The Prince of Wales now needed to save himself. If it looked as if he was at risk of falling into rebel hands he should flee England for France, Charles advised.33 Later Charles changed his mind, and suggested the prince go to Protestant Denmark instead.

  Further military defeats followed like hammer blows. On 10 September 1645 Rupert surrendered Bristol. On 13 September Montrose’s army was defeated in Scotland at the Battle of Philiphaugh. Then, on 14 October, Oliver Cromwell arrived in north Hampshire at the long-besieged Basing House, stronghold of the Catholic Marquess of Winchester, and a leading Royalist fortress.

  Cromwell had an army of 7,000 battle-hardened troops. Basing House had 300 defenders, including clergymen and priests, actors and artists, women and children. The seventy-two-year-old Inigo Jones had used his talents as an architect to help plan the defences, and the women had been taking lead from the roof to cast bullets. They called Basing ‘Loyalty House’ and they had carved these words in the windowpanes. Cromwell saw it merely as ‘a nest of Romanists’.34

  Cromwell’s first cannon shot killed two of Lady Winchester’s ladies and his troops soon overwhelmed the house. A hundred survivors of the attack were killed on the spot, ‘many whereof in cold blood’.35 ‘You must remember what they were’, a parliamentary newspaper noted: ‘they were most of them papists; therefore our muskets and our swords did show but little compassion’.36 Six of the Catholic priests were murdered with four others kept alive only so they might be drawn and quartered in public executions. But there were not only Catholics here. One Protestant clergyman, who had been severely wounded, saw his daughter’s head split open with a sword after she had abused Cromwell’s men as Roundheads and traitors. Past insults were equally costly. A comedian from Drury Lane, who had mocked Puritans in his routines, was killed by a Roundhead major doing ‘the Lord’s work’.37 Charles had once observed that while dull comedians are condemned, the witty are more hated.38 The comic from Drury Lane had been far too witty for his own good.

  When the killing was finished, the house was plundered of its famous riches, and the remaining civilians stripped of anything of value, including their clothes. Warwick’s former protégé, Hugh Peter, now the New Model Army’s chief chaplain and propagandist, saw ‘8 or 9 gentlewomen of rank running forth together’ as they were grabbed at and stripped by the Roundhead soldiers. A fire then began and soon the great palace and its works of art were in flames. Inigo Jones was carried out wrapped in a blanket through billowing smoke as the palace burned. In the cellars, meanwhile, the remnants of the garrison were dying in the flames. Hugh Peter reported hearing their last futile cries for quarter before the nest of Romanists was at last snuffed out.39

  The victors of that summer did not represent the whole of the Long Parliament as elected in 1641, or even that part of Parliament that had opposed Charles after 1642. They represented one party, the Independents. They had in their control the New Model Army, which had matured into a disciplined fighting force, and that was, crucially, regularly paid and so less prone to desertions than Essex’s army had been.40 There still remained, however, a very substantial Presbyterian party, not only in Parliament, but also in the City of London, where many people were fearful of ‘the increase of heresies, sects and schisms’ encouraged by the Independents.41 Together with the Scots, the English Presbyterian party, still including Holland, now offered secret peace terms to Charles. They agreed that Charles could keep many of his powers. In return, however, he would have to accept the Covenant. Henrietta Maria urged her husband to accept this offer. Charles ignored her. He would never equivocate on his belief in the divine origins of a Protestant episcopate.

  Charles returned to his capital at Oxford, and prepared to play the Presbyterians and the Independents off against each other. It would buy him time and let God do his work.

  * The hostile crowd included Sir John Clotworthy, the man who had destroyed the Rubens in Henrietta Maria’s chapel.

  * 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.

  19

  ‘THE GOLDEN BALL’

  IT HAD BEEN YEARS SINCE CHARLES HAD WORN COSTUME FOR A masque. Now, once more, he was dressing for a part. At midnight, on the eve of 27 April 1646, his cousin Richmond and his Gentleman of the Bedchamber, John Ashburnham, began to trim the king’s beard and cut off his lovelock. Charles had dressed as a groom, and he put on a peaked hunter’s cap to hide his face. Oxford was under siege and he needed to escape the city undetected. The clock struck 3 a.m. as he rode across Magdalen Bridge. A friend bade him ‘Farewell, Harry’–the name he had chosen for the road–then he was away, riding from Oxford into the witching hour along with Ashburnham and a royal chaplain called Michael Hudson.1

  Charles had left behind the twelve-year-old James, Duke of York, who was living on half rations in solidarity with ordinary Royalist residents of the city. The road was thick with Independents from the army and Charles had been warned that, if he were caught, they ‘would treat him very barbarously’. He did not want that for his son.

  Charles’s options now remained limited. His last significant body of infantry had been defeated at Stow-on-the-Wold in March. Nevertheless, he intended to make the best use of those cards that he had left to play. ‘I am endeavouring to get to London,’ he explained to a friend, ‘being not without hope that I shall be able to draw either the Presbyterians or Independents to side with me, for extirpating the one or the other.’ If he failed, ‘I desire you to tell all my friends that, if I cannot live as a king, I shall die as a gentleman.’2

  The Independents anticipated Charles’s possible return to the capital with considerable anxiety. They knew it could well trigger a London uprising in his favour. Charles’s reinstatement as king was seen as essential to restoring the normality people yearned for, and at the very least, his appearance would ‘attract hearts’.

  Charles lingered west of London waiting for intelligence. The F
rench allies of the queen’s party had assured Charles that he would be well received by the Scots and, when a messenger arrived warning him not to expect favourable terms in London, he made the decision to ride instead to the Scottish garrison at Southwell, near Newark in the Midlands.3

  To avoid detection Charles and his companions took a circuitous route, skirting the Fens and riding north-west from Huntingdon. They stopped for the night at the wayside cottages of Coppingford, using aliases. Charles tried to sleep on the floor at the inn, but the snores of the innkeeper kept him awake. The next day the tired king rode on, evading capture until he pulled up his horse at the garrison courtyard of the Scottish army on 5 May 1646. Their commander reported to London that Charles’s sudden appearance ‘filled us with amazement and made us like men that dream’.4 They could hardly believe their luck as the king announced his surrender.

  The Independents, by contrast, were ‘drooping sorrowful’ when they heard the news. Possession of the king was vital to the political calculations of all parties. No settlement was deemed possible without the king’s consent, and now the Presbyterians would be the ones negotiating with him.5

  The Scots promptly took Charles north to Newcastle. Charles knew it as a beautiful city of over 10,000 souls, described in England as ‘inferior for wealth and buildings to no city save London and Bristol’.6 But, to Charles’s horror, his servants were removed as soon as he arrived and he was shut in the governor’s house with guards beneath his windows. He was not to be an honoured guest of the Scots, as he had been led to believe, but their prisoner.