The White King Page 26

  On 11 November Cromwell sent a letter to Hampton Court warning the governor of rumours of a planned assassination attempt on Charles. ‘Have care of your guards. It would be accounted a most horrid act,’ he wrote.28 In his rooms, Charles received a further letter warning his assassination was imminent. He was loath to flee Hampton Court. To do so would be to break his parole, and his word. Being in army hands also had the advantage of maintaining pressure on the Hamiltonian Scots to come to an agreement with him. A Royalist treaty with the Scots was already ‘very near to a conclusion’.29 This would not be much use to him, however, if he were murdered.

  It was a Thursday, the day when Charles was in the habit of writing letters in his bedchamber for the foreign post. It would be some hours before his disappearance was noticed. It was too good an opportunity to miss. At about six that evening Charles and three of his companions made their way by the cellar stairs to the garden and from there they rode to the river. Eventually one of his guards, thinking the king had been ‘remarkably retiring’, decided to open the doors.30 He found Charles gone.

  21

  ROYALIST RISING

  IT WAS COLD AND RAINING AS CHARLES RODE INTO THE NIGHT with his companions. They had fresh horses waiting for them at an inn in Sutton, south of London, on the lower slopes of the North Downs. Lost for a time in the dark, they arrived only at daybreak, on 12 November 1647. By then the inn had a local parliamentary county committee meeting taking place. It was too dangerous to stop. Charles called for his fresh horses, and they rode on without rest. The next stop would be Place House in south Hampshire, the seat of the Royalist Earl of Southampton.1

  Charles had left two letters behind in his bedchamber at Hampton Court. In one he thanked his jailors for their care and asked them to look after his beloved dogs, a greyhound called Gypsy and a spaniel called Rogue. Another letter informed Parliament that he had fled Hampton Court in order ‘to be heard with Freedom, Honour and Safety’ and to ‘show myself ready to be Pater Patriae’–father of his people.2 The question was, where could he go ‘to be heard with Freedom, Honour and Safety’? Some of Charles’s supporters advised that fleeing to the French or the Scots was unpatriotic and that he needed to stay in England, albeit somewhere his physical safety could be assured. Charles believed there was no longer anywhere truly safe in England.

  Southampton’s mother was expecting the king and welcomed him on his arrival at the tall turreted gatehouse. Place House had once been the Abbey of Titchfield, a long-established stopping point on the way to France. Charles was told, however, that there was no ship available for him. He could not stay undiscovered long at Place House.3 His Gentleman of the Bedchamber, John Ashburnham, ‘whom the king loved and trusted very much’, suggested that the young governor of the Isle of Wight, the Parliamentarian Colonel Robert Hammond, might prove sympathetic. Hammond’s uncle was a devoted royal chaplain and Hammond was surely no Independent.4 Charles agreed an approach should be made. Ashburnham left immediately with another of Charles’s devoted companions, the forty-year-old Sir John Berkeley.

  On the Isle of Wight, Hammond went white as Berkeley and Ashburnham presented him with the royal request for asylum. It meant he either had to betray Parliament by helping the king, or betray the king to Parliament. Hammond began to shake so violently Berkeley thought he was going to fall off his horse. He agreed to help, but he persuaded Ashburnham that it was better Charles give himself up than risk being caught by more dangerous men. Ashburnham and Berkeley duly returned to Place House with Hammond and a small escort of Hammond’s men. As Berkeley waited downstairs with Hammond, John Ashburnham went to tell Charles. ‘Jack, thou hast undone me!’ the king exclaimed.

  At Syon House, James, Duke of York, swore as he was told of his father’s capture. When one of Northumberland’s servants rebuked the fourteen-year-old, James grabbed his longbow and had to be tackled to the ground. James understood what Ashburnham had not–that his father’s situation was rendered more dangerous than ever.

  On 19 November 1647, Charles celebrated his forty-seventh birthday at the formidable medieval fortress of Carisbrooke Castle. He had swapped Hampton Court, a stone’s throw from London, for isolation on the remote Isle of Wight. ‘He could not have come to a worse place for himself’ was the view of one local gentleman, Sir John Oglander.

  Charles would also now have to negotiate with a reunited army. Fairfax and Cromwell had confronted and punished mutineers at the Corkbush Field army rendezvous, riding into the ranks of men wearing copies of The Agreement of the People in their hat bands, and beating the soldiers with the flats of their swords until they threw their manifestos away. Three ringleaders were sentenced to death and, after lots were cast, one was shot on the spot. It marked the doom of the Leveller cause–and perhaps of Charles’s cause too.

  The generals and their allies were now to take a much tougher bargaining position. Charles had betrayed their trust in breaking his parole, and his stubbornness in not accepting the Heads of Proposals had risked a radical backlash that had placed the constitution, and the protection it offered the propertied classes, at risk. As Christmas approached Charles’s favoured bedchamber servants were replaced by Parliament-appointed spies. He was also confined within Carisbrooke’s outer line of defence.5 Charles spent his days walking his dogs, Gypsy and Rogue (who had been brought to Carisbrooke), around the castle perimeter. It offered ‘a delightful prospect of land and sea’–a taste of the freedom he was now denied. In due course, a bowling green would also help while away the hours, but he spent much of his time with his books: ‘Dum spiro, spero’, he wrote in his copy of Shakespeare’s plays; ‘While I breathe, I hope’.6 He kept up his spirits with reading the comedies.7

  The latest proposals from Parliament were delivered on Christmas Eve. They included a demand that Charles lose control of the militia in perpetuity. Only if he agreed would Parliament treat with him on other contentious issues. Charles pretended to consider their proposals in order to keep pressure on the Scots, with whom he was still negotiating. On 26 December he enjoyed success. The Scots signed a secret treaty with Charles known as the Engagement. It promised a Scottish invasion of England, allied with an army from Ireland under the Marquess of Ormonde. In return, Charles agreed to establish Presbyterianism for three years, crush the radical Protestant sects in England and work for a union of the kingdoms that would protect Scottish autonomy.8 The stage was now set for a second civil war. All it would take to light the touchpaper was a Royalist rising in England.

  One of the most hated aspects of Parliament’s rule was the Puritan reform of manners. The Book of Sports with its implicit encouragement of fun and games on Sundays had long been overthrown. But that summer the old Catholic holy day of Christmas, with its drinking, plays and dancing, had also been abolished.* This interference in the traditions and fun of the average Englishman proved too much for many to stomach. There were a number of violent incidents across England in December with serious riots in Norwich, Ipswich and Oxford. The most spectacular reaction, however, took place at Canterbury in Kent.

  On 22 December 1647 Canterbury’s town crier had dutifully reiterated that Christmas Day was a normal working day, ‘and whosoever shall hang at any door rosemary, holly, bay, or other superstitious herb, shall be liable to the penalties decreed by the ordinance of last year. And whosoever shall cause to be made, either plum pottage or nativity pie, is hereby warned that it is contrary to the said ordinance.’ People went ahead anyway, baked their illegal mince pies and dressed their homes with sprigs of illicit holly. On 25 December the Puritan mayor saw that several shopkeepers had closed their stores and decided to make an example of one. Orders were issued for the man to be taken to the stocks where he would be left overnight. The shopkeeper might well have died of exposure if it wasn’t for the angry crowds that had gathered as he was taken. They jostled the mayor, who lashed out. This proved to be the trigger for a town revolt. The mayor was knocked down, grabbed by the heels and dragged through the
gutter. Games of football then began at either end of Canterbury, with balls kicked through Puritan windows. Two days later the Christmas rebels were in control of the city, decorating doorways with branches of holly and adopting the slogan ‘For God, King Charles and Kent’.

  Meanwhile, on 29 December, as the Canterbury riots spread through neighbouring villages, a former Royalist officer called Burley attempted to lead a storming of Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight. He failed and by the end of December the army had managed to contain England’s Christmas riots. But when Burley was executed in February a rumour began that he was a holy martyr and ‘that where he was quartered is a spring of blood’.9 Kent was restive again and there were fresh riots, this time in London.

  Charles, meanwhile, continued to encourage James to try to escape. When another of his letters to James fell into Parliament’s hands, James was threatened with the Tower. The boy was sufficiently frightened to give up the cipher he used to communicate with the king, but he refused to betray his accomplices, who included a female attendant of his twelve-year-old sister, Elizabeth. He wrote a letter to Parliament instead, swearing: ‘I will engage my honour and faith never more to engage in such business.’10 He was rewarded with a pay rise: £500 a year just to spend on his recreations and field sports–a little taste of how sweet life would be for him, if he turned away from his loyalties to the king.11

  On 20 March 1648, Charles himself tried to escape. With his guards drunk on a gift of wine, he squeezed through his barred window, ready to drop to the ground from a silk rope. Unfortunately the bars were too narrow even for his slim frame and, ‘sticking fast between breast and shoulders, he was not able to go forwards or backwards’. There was a long and painful struggle before the king, with a groan, retreated back into his room.12 Undaunted, Charles then acquired nitric acid and saws to remove the bars. But on 20 April, James vanished from St James’s Palace, ensuring his father would be watched more carefully than ever.

  James had used a game of hide and seek in the gardens of St James’s Palace as cover for a secret rendezvous. Playing with his younger brother and Northumberland’s own children he had hidden in the bushes, where he met with a Royalist spy called Joseph Bampfield. They arranged to meet again that night. When it was dark James pretended to go to bed, but instead went to say his goodbyes to his sister Elizabeth. Her little black dog followed him back to his room, so he shut it in, and took a back stairway to the garden. He tripped in the dark and the crash convinced him he must have been heard. He dashed back to his room and pretended to read. When no one came he set off again, down the stairs, out of a back door into the garden and from there he ran into St James’s Park.

  Bampfield, waiting with a wig and cloak, took James by carriage to a safe house, where Bampfield’s mistress was waiting with another disguise for James. ‘Quickly, quickly dress me,’ the boy demanded. She did as she was asked, lacing James into a gentlewoman’s waistcoat with a scarlet petticoat and over them a mohair overcoat that had been made especially for him. She ‘thought him very pretty in it’.13 From the house James was taken to the river. As the lights on his fishing boat were dimmed, and it slipped out past the Tilbury–Gravesend blockhouses that guarded the Thames, James knew he was free. Only the open sea lay ahead before he would reach Holland. There he was reunited with his sister Mary, ‘the affectionateness of which meeting I cannot express’, he later recalled.14

  The opening shots of a rising had by now been fired. In south Wales, on 23 March 1648, a former Parliamentarian major general and his colonel had led a mutiny and declared for the king. Many other former Parliamentarians also now joined Royalists against the New Model Army and the Independents. In the north of England, on 28 and 29 April, Berwick and Carlisle fell to their forces.

  Petitions were also being circulated across the country calling for a personal treaty with the king, an end to high taxes and the suppression of the sects. On 4 May the formerly staunchly Parliamentarian county of Essex delivered one such to Westminster bearing 20,000 signatures, and with 2,000 people marching in train. That same month the trial of the Christmas rioters in Kent ended with the jury throwing out the charges and a Royalist rising in the county. The rebels seized control of Rochester, Sittingbourne, Faversham and Sandwich. On 27 May this, in turn, triggered a Royalist mutiny at the Downs naval base. Warwick, who had been obliged to resign as Lord Admiral in 1645 under the Self-Denying Ordinance, was reappointed to his former naval post.15 Even he, however, could not win back the mutineers. Nine of Parliament’s ships joined the small Royalist navy. Warwick’s sailors would be facing largely their own former comrades.

  Fairfax and a force of 4,000 New Model Army veterans quickly crushed the Kent rebellion, but 1,500 Royalists escaped across the Thames into Essex. In June parliamentary forces were still putting out brush fires across England and it was a bloody business. The former royal chaplain, Michael Hudson, who had led a rising in Lincolnshire, was cornered on the roof at Woodcraft Hall. He and his last companions were thrown off the building and, when Hudson managed to grip on to a drainage spout, his fingers were slashed with a sword. He fell into the moat below, where he was found still alive. He was then finished off and his body mutilated.

  A week later Fairfax drove the Royalist forces in Essex behind the walls of Colchester, and the town was placed under siege. Fairfax’s men had suffered 500 fatal casualties so far in this rising. More were expected, for the New Model Army would soon have to fight the Scots–and perhaps the Irish too. At a prayer meeting at Windsor a momentous resolution was passed. If they won this new war of the Engagement they would call ‘Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to account for the blood he has shed’.

  It was not, however, Charles, isolated on the Isle of Wight, on whom the Royalist war command was now centred. It was instead the frail figure of his thirty-eight-year-old queen in France. Henrietta Maria had grown so thin with her illness that she was almost disfigured, her large mouth out of all scale to her face. The French courtier Mme de Motteville recalled that ‘there was something so agreeable in her expression that it made her beloved by everyone’, but also admitted there was ‘no trace remaining of her past beauty’. The loveliness of her youth ‘had lasted a morning and left her before midday’.16 It was, nevertheless, necessary for the ailing Henrietta Maria to project strength. To raise money for the Royalist forces her creditors had to believe that one day she would be able to pay them back.

  Henrietta Maria played to the hilt the part of a great daughter of France, who would be backed by her Bourbon relations until Charles’s ultimate victory. She dressed with magnificence at royal ceremonial occasions in Paris and at court entertainments she amused and charmed. Her childhood education had been limited, but it seemed to Mme de Motteville that ‘her misfortunes had repaired that defect, for grievous experience had given her capacity’. Henrietta Maria had developed ‘infinite wit, and a brilliant mind’.17 She used her considerable skills to raise large sums of money for Charles’s cause. This included a recent bill of exchange for 80,000 Dutch florins from a Parisian banker called Canatrini, and a further 10,600 French livres from a Jacques Mauchias, which she used to buy arms for Ormonde’s Irish army.18

  In July 1648, Mme de Motteville saw the queen at a Carmelite convent, where Henrietta Maria had been busy writing dispatches ‘of great importance’.* All of Wales, save for Pembroke Castle, was already back under parliamentary control and the imminent prospect of a Scottish invasion in support of Charles had diminished enthusiasm for the Royalist cause in the north. But her son, the Prince of Wales, had sailed to his father’s aid at the head of the newly expanded Royalist navy. He was now a grown man of eighteen and Henrietta Maria hoped that, if a planned rising in the south-east of England could coincide with the Royalist navy anchoring off London and with the planned Scottish invasion, the Royalists could yet divide and destroy the New Model Army.

  Henrietta Maria sipped out of a little gold cup as she talked with Mme de Motteville. It was, she told her
friend, the only gold she had left, and her servants were bombarding her with demands for money.19 She was, however, in regular contact with her former favourites, those Janus-faced cousins Henry Holland and Lucy Carlisle, who had been gathering forces for the crucial new rising.

  Lucy had sold a pearl necklace valued at £1,500 to raise money ‘for officers and other provisions’.20 Holland, meanwhile, was commissioning men. Amongst them were the two young sons of the murdered Duke of Buckingham. George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, was now twenty and Francis Villiers, who had been born after their father’s murder, was eighteen, and like his father ‘of admirable beauty’.21 When they were young children they had been raised with the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, but they had taken no part in the war and had just returned from a two-year educational tour of Europe. Looking for sophisticated companionship they ‘fell easily into the friendship of the Earl of Holland’ and he soon persuaded them ‘to embark themselves in his adventure’.22 It was, Holland believed, a ‘good and pious thing, to rescue our country from the misery and slavery they were now under’.23

  By 2 July Holland’s efforts to smuggle large numbers of horses into the country had been discovered. Unable to wait any longer for the expected Scottish invasion, Holland decided to press on with the southern rising, gambling that it would trigger a major rebellion in London. Taking the Villiers brothers with him, he travelled south-west and, on 5 July, they arrived at Kingston upon Thames in Surrey along with 500–600 men. They immediately began to recruit more.24 Two days later they were caught up in a deadly skirmish on Surbiton Common. The teenage Francis Villiers had his horse killed under him, but fought on, trapped with his back to a hedge. There he was struck down and the nose cut off his beautiful face.25 Holland and young Buckingham escaped and arrived at St Neots in Cambridgeshire, eighty-seven miles away, on 9 July, with around 300 survivors.