The White King Page 24

  It was vital for the Scots that Charles now agree to sign the Covenant. The English Parliament had already established Presbyterianism in England that March. In place of the king and his bishops, the parishes of the Church of England were to be governed by a minister and ruling elders. They were, in turn, placed under the government of Parliament. The Scots called this secular control ‘a lame… Presbytery’. Yet it was better than no presbytery at all–and that was the threat posed by an un-Covenanted king. Only if Charles accepted that episcopacy was an illegitimate form of church government would the future of Presbyterianism in Scotland be truly secure from any future royal threat.

  On 19 May 1646 Charles ordered his remaining armies to lay down their arms. He was ready to admit he was defeated militarily. The civil war was over, leaving a kingdom bled white by deaths from war and disease greater as a percentage of population even than the losses in the trenches of World War One. Foreigners noted the very character of the English people had changed: they were hardened and embittered. Nearly everyone assumed that Charles would now agree to the Covenant. But while he might give up his armies, Charles would not surrender his conscience. The Scottish commissioners were reduced to tears and to chasing him from room to room in their efforts to persuade him to give way on this vital matter. Some believed the king needed only to be properly educated in the right religion. Charles, however, was unimpressed by the sermons their ministers delivered to him. One homily, given at his dining table, was brought to a close by the king impatiently stabbing at his meat with his fork. On another occasion, he ended a church sermon by rousing the congregation to sing Psalm 56–a prayer for relief from your tormenters. It was said that people sang who hadn’t raised their voices in years.

  Henrietta Maria joined the Scots in pleading with Charles to sign the Covenant. To the queen, London was well worth the mitres of a bench of Protestant bishops. This only provoked Charles to turn on his wife, railing against the ‘false’ dealings of her Scottish friends and their ‘barbarous usage’ of him. To their faces, however, he kept his temper as far as he could, playing golf with his jailors, and asking only for James to be sent to him.

  Charles regretted that his energetic second son had missed out on his studies during the war. He remained a father as well as a king and he hoped earnestly only that one day James would ‘ply his book more and his gun less’. He also had to consider, however, that if the Prince of Wales succeeded in fleeing to France (as he would do in June) then James could be made king in their place. Charles needed James to be either out of the country like his elder brother, or under his own care. For the time being, however, James remained in Oxford, where negotiations for the surrender of the town continued.

  The besieged inhabitants of Oxford and Fairfax’s army were still exchanging cannon fire on 30 May. The Royalists let off 200 shot, killing a Roundhead colonel, and a man victualling the army. The Roundhead ‘cannon in recompense played fiercely upon the town, and much annoyed them in their works and colleges’.7 Later that day, however, a cessation of ‘great shot’ was agreed. To encourage Oxford to continue the surrender negotiations, Fairfax sent James a ‘brace of bucks, two muttons, two veals, two lamb and six capon’, to remind him of the food that he–and other residents–were missing.8 There was no response from James, but in one of Charles’s lost letters, written to Oxford in cipher, he asked his supporters to take ‘care particularly’ of the university when agreeing the final surrender terms, and ‘to try to get the Duke of York sent hither to me’.9 That proved impossible.

  On 17 June there was a general cessation of arms and drunken fraternising between the two forces, as Royalists and Roundheads celebrated the end of the fighting. Three days later Oxford made its official surrender and James was handed over to Fairfax. Four carriages and six horses were ordered to take him to St James’s Palace. There he was to be placed under the supervision of the Earl of Northumberland, who already had the care of James’s younger siblings Henry and Elizabeth, whom James hadn’t seen for four years. Charles’s wartime capital could now return to its former role as a university town. Up to 3,000 Royalist troops left Oxford on 24 June, 900 marching over Magdalen Bridge with all the honours of war, and between lines of rebel forces. They were replaced by three regiments of Roundhead foot, Puritan soldiers taking the rooms in the town formerly inhabited by Cavaliers.

  The king’s spirit rose briefly when he learned in July that the baby of the royal family, the two-year-old Henrietta, had, at least, escaped Parliament’s control. Her godmother, Lady Dalkeith, had snatched her from Oatlands Palace in Surrey, with the connivance of the palace servants. His pretty baby girl had been disguised as a boy, dressed in patched clothing, and was called ‘Peter’, a fact the little princess had resented deeply. Before she boarded the boat to France, she told people firmly that she was not a ‘Peter’, and her clothes were not her own.10 In Paris, Henrietta Maria had been thinking of her abandoned daughter ‘a hundred times a day’, and when she saw Henrietta ‘she embraced, she hugged again and again that royal infant’.11 Henrietta would grow up to be one of the brightest stars of Louis XIV’s court. But Charles, who had only ever seen his daughter once and briefly, after her christening at Exeter in July 1644, must have wondered if he would ever do so again.

  The latest terms for Charles’s restoration as king in England and Scotland, hammered out between the English Independent and Presbyterian parties, and presented to him in Newcastle by Parliament on 28 July, were, he declared, repugnant to his ‘conscience, crown and honour’.12 Charles had to agree to the abolition of episcopacy, the twenty-year suspension of his powers over the militia, and the handing over of fifty-six supporters to almost certain death. Charles was ready to accept a temporary compromise on the matter of the bishops, as with the militia. But he would not agree episcopacy was intrinsically wrong.* Nor would he agree to the execution of fifty-six of his friends–not even one. Strafford’s death still haunted him.

  The Scots, who had backed the Newcastle Propositions, were losing patience with Charles. Yet they dared not risk keeping their army in England. Their presence was bitterly unpopular and this damaged the English Presbyterian party led by the Earl of Essex. Reluctantly, therefore, they prepared to hand Charles over to the divided English Parliament and to withdraw their army. They relied on Essex to continue to look after their interests in Parliament.

  But, just as a £400,000 payment to the Scots for their part in helping Parliament win the war was agreed, Essex suffered a massive stroke. He died four days later on 14 September 1646, with his cousin and political ally, Henry Holland, at his side.13

  Essex was given a regal funeral in Westminster Abbey based on the funeral rites given to Charles’s elder brother in 1612. Vast crowds came out in the rain to see the cortège as it passed through London’s streets. Essex’s funeral effigy, lying on his coffin, was dressed in his buff-coloured military coat, scarlet breeches and parliamentary robes. Essex had dedicated his life to what he had seen as a movement of aristocratic virtue, one in which the nobles worked for the public good, protecting their liberties and ‘true’ religion. He had never been in sympathy with the sectarians allied to Cromwell, and doubted their attachment to any liberty other than the freedom to do whatever they wished.

  With Essex dead the Scots were more anxious than ever about handing Charles over to an unstable Parliament. By early 1647 the Presbyterians had gained a majority in both the Lords and the Commons. This was not, however, because Presbyterianism was popular with MPs. It was merely judged to be the most effective means of repressing something worse: the growing tide of religio-political radicalism. The Independents could still overtop the Presbyterian party and the king would then be in their hands. The Scots, therefore, asked for assurances of the king’s honourable treatment, and that no settlement would be made against Scottish interests. The message came back that Parliament would dispose of matters as it saw fit, with Independents pointing to the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots, as an example of the po
wer they could wield. This was a threat to Charles’s life–and it was one that Charles himself took very seriously.

  If Charles were killed his son, the Prince of Wales, would succeed him. Charles knew his heir was intelligent and able, but to observers ‘he seemed to have no sense of religion’.14 Theology had not been a priority of his former governor, the Marquess of Newcastle, under whom he had learned instead to dance and ride very well, and to enjoy literature. The education the prince might have had to rectify this later had not been possible during the war. Instead the traumas the future Charles II had been through were shaping a charming young man, who was also deeply cynical. The prince was now in France where he would be subject to the influence of the queen’s party, who believed the king had to accept Presbyterianism in order to be restored to his thrones. If the Church of England was to keep its bishops Charles needed to stay alive.

  The king’s best hope was escape. He now wrote in secret to his fifteen-year-old daughter Mary, asking her to send a warship that would take him to Holland. Mary’s marriage to William of Orange, arranged during the crisis winter of 1640–1, was not a particularly happy one. When she had left England in 1642 Charles had instructed her governess that the marriage should not be consummated until she was at least fourteen. But in February 1644, when Mary was still only twelve, the prince had bullied his way to her rooms and had sex with his child bride. Mary had never warmed to this selfish man, but she was deeply loyal to her father. In November 1646 a thirty-four-gun Dutch warship duly arrived at the Tyne. Its gilded stern was carved with figures of Mary and William of Orange, and between them an orange tree laden with fruit representing their future children. A Yorkshirewoman took advantage of the spectacle to pretend she was Mary. The con artist installed herself in fine accommodation and the locals came to kiss her hand–until the truth was discovered and she was whipped out of town. Meanwhile, the Dutch admiral met Charles, ostensibly to deliver a letter from his daughter, but in reality to plot Charles’s escape.

  Unfortunately, just before Christmas, a letter from Charles urging James also to escape was discovered at St James’s Palace. James was interrogated, an incident reminiscent of the Victorian painting And When Did You Last See Your Father? by W. F. Yeames. It depicts a golden-haired boy, dressed in silk, facing a panel of dark-clad Parliament men, just as James surely faced. James was asked why he had kept his father’s letter hidden. He had acted ‘out of obedience to the king’s command and in kindness to his father’, he replied, reminding them ‘he had so many obligations from a loving father as to command secrecy from him’.15

  Guards were now placed in Charles’s apartments, and on 30 January 1647, soon after the first £100,000 down payment on their £400,000 was paid, the Scottish army handed Charles to the English Parliament, and abandoned Newcastle for Scotland. The Covenanters, Charles observed, had ‘sold him at too cheap a rate’.16 Without him they had lost all leverage in England while earning contempt for ‘betraying of my safety and honour for their own advantages’.17 He was right on both counts. They had sold the life of their king for silver and even a fellow Covenanter-Scot warned that ‘the dogs in the street would piss upon them’ for what they had done.18 The townsfolk of Newcastle threw stones at the backs of the Scots as they left for their homeland. When Charles left the town on 3 February, under the guardianship of commissioners of the English Parliament, more crowds came out, but this time to cheer.

  Hatred of Parliament’s Scottish allies had revived pro-Royalist feeling in the north. Along the route south people brought out victims of the skin disease scrofula for Charles to cure with his royal touch, just as Christ had cured the lepers. Their enthusiasm reflected, however, not only the belief that he was a king chosen by God, but also the national yearning for peace. People complained their condition was ‘in every way worse than before this [perpetual] parliament began’.19 Even those areas of England that had avoided battles and plundering were being impoverished by taxation. Parliament’s monthly wartime levy alone amounted annually to ten times Charles’s controversial Ship Money tax of the 1630s, while an excise duty on consumption of many common goods, copied from the Dutch, fell particularly hard on the poor.

  England urgently wanted a return to the ‘old, known ways’ of a king ruling with his Parliament. But the question set at the outset of the war remained: where should the balance of power lie between king and Parliament in England’s mixed monarchy?

  Charles’s new prison, the Elizabethan palace of Holdenby House in Northamptonshire, had ‘a pleasant, spacious and fair garden’ with walks, orchards, fishponds and bowling alleys.20 The Presbyterian-dominated Parliament did not permit him use of the now banned Book of Common Prayer, but he was able to hunt, and be entertained by the local gentry. These pleasures came to an abrupt end on 3 June 1647, with the sudden arrival at Holdenby of over 500 New Model horsemen: more than enough to overawe Parliament’s garrison of fifty or sixty men. Charles could only guess what was happening, but Royalist agents had been keeping him abreast of dramatic political developments in London that suggested a possible coup.

  The Presbyterian majority of Parliament lacked the military power they needed to force the Independents to accept the peace they wanted to agree with Charles. To achieve this they had been moving to create an army answerable to them. The Presbyterians planned to do to the New Model Army what the Independents had done to the armies of Essex, Waller and Manchester in 1646. It was to be broken up and those commanders they wanted to be rid of–Independents such as Oliver Cromwell–retired. The disbandment of the New Model infantry had duly been announced on 25 May, with soldiers offered a mere two months’ arrears in pay. Parliament was virtually bankrupt and the regular pay the army had enjoyed had come to an end. The arrears offered were far less than the soldiers were owed. Over the following days, however, Cromwell’s house in Drury Lane had seen the arrival of a stream of religious radicals and New Model officers, united in their anger. While Mrs Cromwell fed her husband’s visitors bread and butter washed down with small beer, the men talked and plotted. On 31 May they included a twenty-nine-year-old cornet–the lowest rank of commissioned officer–called George Joyce. It was he who commanded the horsemen that now appeared at Holdenby.

  There was an agony of waiting for whatever would happen next. The following night, Charles was disturbed by the sound of arguing outside his door. It was possible that the moment of his assassination had arrived. This was the usual fate of a deposed King of England. His servants were now refusing Joyce entry. Anxious for their safety, Charles commanded that Joyce be admitted. He was confronted by a thickset Londoner and former tailor, with fashionable long brown hair. Joyce demanded the king accompany him from the house. The young radical believed that the garrison commander had gone to get help and he had made the decision that Charles must be removed to somewhere more securely in the army’s control. Charles agreed to leave if Joyce offered him assurances that he would not be harmed, that his servants might accompany him, and that he would now be allowed to practise his religious beliefs. Joyce accepted his terms.*

  At six the following morning Charles emerged from Holdenby and stood on the front lawn under the June sky. Joyce had his troopers drawn up smartly in ordered ranks. On his command his men shouted out their adherence to the promises of the night before. This strange democracy prompted Charles to reflect that he had not yet seen Joyce’s orders, so he asked, ‘What commission have you to secure my person?’ Joyce blustered. Charles persisted, ‘Have you nothing in writing from Sir Thomas Fairfax, your general, to do what you do?’ Still receiving no straight answer, Charles pressed further: ‘I pray you, Mr Joyce,’ he demanded, ‘what commission you have.’ Joyce gesticulated, ‘Here is my commission!’ ‘Where?’ Charles asked, bewildered. Joyce then turned in his saddle and pointed at his soldiers, ‘It is behind me.’ ‘It is as fair a commission, and as well written a commission as I have seen in my life,’ Charles observed drily.21 He began his journey with Joyce without further protest,
‘rather’, he noted, ‘than be carried by neck and heels’.22

  The king was, in Fairfax’s phrase, ‘the golden ball cast between two parties’. The faction that had possession of Charles had control of the peace process. The New Model Army now had him, and hoped to make good use of their prize.

  * 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.

  * 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.

  20

  ‘A CLOUDED MAJESTY’

  CHARLES MET FAIRFAX AND CROMWELL OUTSIDE NEWMARKET ON 7 June 1647. Fairfax kissed the king’s hand. Commonly known as ‘Black Tom’ for his dark colouring, he had been shot twice in battle, once in the shoulder and once in the wrist, while his face remained badly scarred by the sword thrust he had received at Marston Moor. A Yorkshireman of few words, he was ‘the only judge’ in the army’s Councils of War. Yet the decision to secure the king at Holdenby had been made by Cromwell without his authority.1 Cromwell too now bowed his head to the king. It was the first time Charles had met the man who would be his nemesis.