Meanwhile peace efforts were in process. If they failed, the finger of blame was already being pointed at Henrietta Maria, with fears expressed that ‘her ardent French temper may inspire the king… to vigorous resolution’.5 She was even compared to another French-born Queen of England, Margaret of Anjou, that ‘tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide’, blamed for much of the bloodshed of the Wars of the Roses. The truth was rather different.
Many had expected Essex to win a decisive battlefield victory over the king at their first engagement. Charles had arrived in York in 1642 with only thirty or forty followers. His achievements since then had been extraordinary. He had not only survived the Battle of Edgehill, his forces were now on the attack. The future the Parliamentarians faced was either total defeat by the king, or a long civil war that would threaten the established order, bankrupt the country, and hand power to military men. This prospect had split the Junto. There was now a war faction and a peace faction, with the Rich brothers, Holland and Warwick, leading figures in the opposing camps.
Both king and Parliament controlled a portion of Holland’s income, making any further extension of the war financially ruinous for him. In common with Northumberland, and several other peers, he was also concerned about the risks to the country of continued instability. They were, therefore, working with a moderate faction in the Commons for a peace treaty that left the king with most of his prerogative powers, and the Church of England with its bishops. It was a peace treaty that Charles was likely to accept. Warwick and the other leaders of the war party included those who had been complicit in the 1640 Scottish invasion, and whose lives remained at risk until Charles was stripped of all meaningful power. They did not want–and could not afford–a ‘moderate’ peace. They included Pym in the Commons and Warwick’s old allies in the Lords, Viscount Saye and Sele and Lord Brooke.
The vast majority of the ordinary English people were with the peace party, sharing Holland’s desire for an end to the war. But they no longer had any real representation in Parliament. With no immediate prospect of having to face re-election, MPs lacked accountability to the ordinary voters. They were subject instead to manipulation by the leaders of the war and peace parties–the ‘grandees’, as they were now known. Policy was being made, and patronage distributed, in back rooms, through the operations of the grandee-dominated ‘executive standing committees’. It was the peace-party grandees who had a treaty delegation sent to Charles in Oxford.6 But the war-party grandees had ensured the proposed terms were far tougher than the king was likely to accept. They included demands that the armies be disbanded before peace negotiations began, and that Charles’s leading friends be delivered up for justice–in other words, death. This was knowingly ‘to propose an impossibility against the making of peace’.7
The war-party grandees realised, however, that they also had to convince the moderate majority of MPs to follow their lead. Here, raising fears of popery still remained their most effective method of persuasion. They therefore now launched a fresh assault on the papist-in-chief–Henrietta Maria.
In March 1643 one of Warwick’s former clients, an Irishman called Sir John Clotworthy, led a party to destroy the images and books in the queen’s Denmark House chapel. He personally slashed the faces in the Rubens masterpiece of the Crucifixion that had been Charles’s gift to her, and then ‘thrusting the hook of his halberd under the feet of the crucified Christ ripped the painting to pieces’.8 It was the greatest single loss to art of the war. Destroying papist paintings remained mere surrogacy, however, for the more important business of destroying actual papists. Henrietta Maria was therefore indeed anxious to stiffen her husband’s resolve not to accept the war party’s terms. ‘If you make a peace and disband your army before there is an end to this perpetual parliament, I am absolutely resolved to go into France,’ she told him, ‘being well assured that if the power remain with them that it will not be well for me in England.’9
In Oxford those Royalists who were as anxious for peace as Holland nevertheless urged Charles to remain flexible in his dealings with Parliament. On 24 March 1643, in a letter written in cipher and neatly in his brown ink, Charles told Henrietta Maria that he was being ‘terribly laboured to grant Parliament base articles of cessation’, with some of his councillors particularly ‘fierce in it’. But he assured her, ‘What I have done concerning the Treaty I am confident will not displease thee.’10 The war-party grandees had succeeded. The terms had been rendered unacceptable to Charles. His final rejection of them was made public in April 1643, to the relief of the queen.
Less than two months later, the Commons began investigating Henrietta Maria for treason and drew up articles of impeachment accusing her of ‘having levied war against Parliament and kingdom’.11 A Royalist newsletter now wondered that ‘good women live the while in a wretched age, who cannot be assisting their husbands in their great necessities… without being traitors to master Pym and some of the good members of both houses’.12 Charles concurred: Henrietta Maria’s only true crime was ‘that she is my wife’.13
Based in York, Henrietta Maria shared both the celebrations of victories and the pain of losses with the Royalist troops, often eating in the sight of the soldiers. She attracted many fresh recruits with her drive, courage and charm. But at the end of June 1643, while Parliament was pursuing her impeachment ‘with great energy’, she told Charles she was obeying his orders to join him at Oxford, and was on her way.14 ‘I carry with me 3,000 foot, thirty company of horse and dragoons, six pieces of cannon, and two mortars,’ she wrote. Listing the commanders, she added self-deprecatingly that this left ‘her she Majesty, generalissima’ only with the ‘baggage to govern’–not that this was a small task. It included 150 wagonloads of essential supplies.
Essex sent cavalry to intercept the queen, but she escaped him on the roads, just as she had escaped Warwick on the high seas in February. Still en route to meet Charles, she even found time to capture Burton upon Trent in a ‘bloody’ and ‘desperate’ battle. Over 400 Parliamentarian soldiers and officers were taken prisoner. She confessed to Charles that her soldiers had ‘plundered so much that they cannot march with the bundles’. A day had to be put aside for them to sell their goods before they could continue.15 She was bone-tired, having not slept more than three hours in a night for days, and travelling on little food. Loyally she told Charles exhaustion and hunger were ‘pleasure to me in regard it is for you; and to let you see by all my actions that I have no delight but to serve you’.16
It had been seventeen months since Charles had parted from his wife at Dover in February 1642 and he was ‘infinitely desiring’ to see her.17 On 13 July, the victorious Henrietta Maria met her husband and her two elder sons at Edgehill. The joy at being reunited was tempered by memories of the battle losses there, witnessed by her sons, and by the fact it was only a partial family reunion. The youngest two children, Elizabeth and Henry, remained in Parliament’s hands. Yet there was much to celebrate. Charles’s armies had enjoyed a slew of recent victories. There was another that very day, at Roundway Down in Wiltshire. A medal struck in its commemoration was to feature Charles and Henrietta Maria with a speared dragon at their feet: St George and his lady, conquering the sin of rebellion.18 It seemed that a final victory over Parliament was now within Charles’s grasp.
As the king entered Oxford with his queen, the Prince of Wales and James, Duke of York, the church bells rang in celebration and crowds cheered them along the streets.
The people of Oxford were living in a strange new normality in Charles’s wartime capital. The university town had a mint producing the king’s new currency, printing presses churning out witty newspapers that did ‘as much prejudice’ to Parliament as ‘any of the cavalier armies’, and there was a gibbet by St Mary’s Church, where Parliament’s spies were hanged.19 All Souls served as the royal arsenal; New College housed a powder magazine.20 Henrietta Maria and her household resided at Merton College and Charles was based at Christ Churc
h, where the main quadrangle also served as a cattle pen. Undergraduates helped build fortifications in their spare hours, or joined the soldiers training in the once sleepy meadows. Ann, Lady Fanshawe–who was both young and pretty–nearly lost her life when a volley of shots fired in her honour sent ‘a brace of bullets not two inches above my head’.21
The more battle-hardened Cavaliers were ‘neat enough and gay in their appearance’ but also ‘vain, empty and careless’.22 Duels, drunken brawls, killings and assaults were regular occurrences. This extended even to the high-ranking servants in Charles’s bedchamber. John Ashburnham, the treasurer and paymaster of his army, fought a duel with Charles’s cousin, the twenty-one-year-old Lord John Stuart.23 This also reflected another problem: the bitter rivalries within Royalist ranks. The high stakes put everyone under strain. As Charles found, it was much easier to control a court in time of peace than an armed party amid the general lawlessness and chaos of a civil war. Anyone would have struggled to discipline Cavaliers whose tempers were up, and Charles had little stick or carrot available to empower him. His means of offering patronage and reward were limited, especially by the loss of London, and he could not easily afford to punish the misdemeanours of loyal and useful followers. Instead of removing Ashburnham from the bedchamber Charles ignored the duel. With such leniency ‘nothing but disorder can be expected’, Charles’s Secretary of State, Sir Edward Nicholas, moaned, and reported to his correspondent a further recent shooting and a wounding as a result of private quarrels.24
Nevertheless, Royalists still continued to come to Oxford to support the king, and to stay there. The streets were thick with aristocrats who had moved from fine houses to little more than garrets. They were, Ann Fanshawe recalled, ‘like fishes out of water… as poor as Job, [with] no more clothes than a man or two brought in their cloak bags’. Their talk was all of ‘losing and of gaining towns and men’, while from their windows they saw ‘the sad spectacle of war, sometimes plague, sometimes sickness of other kinds by reason of so many people being packed together’. Even the smallest dwelling in St Aldate’s, which was one room up and one room down, housed several soldiers sleeping together like sardines. For the most part, however, Ann Fanshawe found people bore their suffering with ‘cheerfulness’.25
On 26 July 1643 there was a further major success for Charles when Prince Rupert took Bristol with men that Henrietta Maria had brought from the north. Charles promptly issued a declaration advertising his commitment to a new peace process. He attached all blame for the war to a ‘committee of a few men’–essentially the war-party grandees and their radical allies.26 Mercy was promised to everyone else, if they now returned to their former loyalty to their king.
On 2 August, Holland and his Parliamentarian allies responded, instigating the setting up of a parliamentary committee to prepare new preliminary peace propositions.27 Holland hoped to win his cousin Essex over to the peace party. If he succeeded Essex’s army could ensure the war party complied with the peace terms. It was a dangerous situation for the war-party grandees and London once again now simmered with barely suppressed violence. The war party had satires and invective printed across the capital with ‘fiery-spirited citizens’ calling for Holland and his allies to be arrested and punished. Nevertheless, on 5 August the Commons voted to consider the peace propositions that had been outlined in the Lords. The response on 7 August, also instigated by the war party’s City friends, came in the form of a 5,000-strong mob descending on Westminster Palace. The intimidated Commons MPs then rejected the peace proposals by a majority of seven. When Holland left the House of Lords, along with two other peers, they too were abused by the mob with shouting and waved fists.
The next day it was the turn of the peace party to bring their own supporters down on Parliament. A crowd of women arrived and battered the door of the House of Commons for an hour, demanding that Pym, Strode and other Roundheads be thrown into the Thames. The hope may have been that using women would prevent bloodshed. If so, that hope was disappointed. When the women returned on 9 August and stoned the guards with pebbles and brickbats, the soldiers fired live rounds at the rioters, killing two men orchestrating the attack. Undeterred, the women continued to shout ‘Give us that dog Pym!’ A company of horse then ‘hunted the said women up and down the back Palace Yard and wounded them with their swords and pistols with no less inhumanity than if they had been brute beasts’.28 Amongst the victims was the daughter of a man who sold spectacles outside Westminster Hall, and who was shot dead while passing by on an innocent errand.29
Many peace-party MPs left the Commons for good, too frightened to return. Six of the peace-party peers went further and defected to the Royalists. Holland was amongst them, gambling that his former closeness to the king and queen would see him quickly restored to favour. Northumberland went home, preferring to watch and wait. He was glad he did. Holland soon discovered that there was to be no fatted calf to welcome the prodigal peers when they reached Oxford. Charles endeavoured to be polite, but his long-standing supporters viewed Holland, in particular, as a Judas. This was a mistake. A welcome would have encouraged Northumberland and other potential defectors to come over.
But Holland also did himself few favours by offering no apology to the king for his past actions. Holland believed that he had acted from the beginning on noble principles. He wanted Charles to accept an Elizabethan-style Calvinist religious settlement and for constitutional liberties to be enforced. Any disloyalty on his part had, in his view, been ‘cancelled by the merit of coming to the king now, and bringing such considerable persons [as the other five peers] with him disposing others [such as Northumberland] to follow’.30 Nevertheless he was prepared to prove his renewed commitment to the king, even in battle. To this end, Holland headed west with Charles and the elder princes for the siege of the city of Gloucester.
Henrietta Maria had argued Charles should instead make for London and take advantage of the divisions between the war and peace parties. The capital had been rocked by anti-conscription riots since the failure of the peace and five people had been killed. Essex’s army had also dwindled through desertions from lack of pay, and deaths from disease. It seemed to the queen that London had been ripe for the taking. Whether that was true or not, with the king besieging Gloucester, Parliament was given a breathing space to bolster Essex’s army. This enabled Essex to take 15,000 men to relieve Gloucester on 5 September. He then headed back to London with his army. If Essex’s army was cut off before he reached his destination, the Royalists knew they could yet attack a weakly defended London–and very possibly win the war. First, however, Charles had to find him. He described it as hunting a fox.
On 14 September Charles wrote he ‘cannot yet get him out of his woods and holes into a fair field, the Earl of Essex keeping altogether in the byways’.31 On 20 September the fox was found–and the opposing armies met for battle at Newbury. Holland rode with Charles’s regiment of horse, who ‘showed a kind of contempt for the enemy’ and ‘charged with wonderful boldness’.32 Newbury was, however, a battle of artillery with pieces given names like ‘Sweet Lips’, in memory of a notorious whore from Hull. One Royalist captain described their deadly kiss: ‘A whole file of men, six deep, with their heads struck off with one cannon shot of ours.’33 The battle ended only when the Royalists ran out of ammunition.
The next day, several Royalist nobles were seen riding up and down the fields ‘to view the dead men and to seek for some lords or earls which they lost’.34 Amongst those cut down was young Robert Dormer, Earl of Carnarvon, a favourite of the queen, who had been shot late in the battle and died in the king’s arms. Charles ordered the mayor of Newbury to care for the remaining injured, including Roundheads, even ‘though they be rebels and deserve the punishment of traitors’.35
Charles had been unable to prevent Essex continuing to London. But there was worse news coming. The Parliamentarian war party was working hard on persuading the Scottish Covenanters into a military alliance, one t
hat would see the Scots join the English civil war on Parliament’s side.
With Charles now on the back foot militarily, Holland once more pressed for him to begin peace negotiations. Holland was often seen in his elegant clothes at Merton, where Henrietta Maria was based, talking with Charles alone by a window. Charles was astonished that Holland ‘behaved himself with the same confidence and assurance as he had done when he was most in his favour’. It seemed that Holland expected immediately to ‘have his key [to the bedchamber] restored to him’.36 Charles now disabused him of that notion, giving Holland’s former post as Groom of the Stool to the Marquess of Hertford, who had been a Royalist since 1642. He also made it clear that he would not seek peace from a position of weakness, and that is exactly what he would be in if the Scots joined the war and he was left heavily outnumbered.
The more aggressive Royalists–who gathered around the queen–wanted Charles to match the Scottish army with his own troops from Ireland. His army there was not doing much good in its war against the Catholic rebels. He could not afford to properly resource it, and it was losing badly. If, on the other hand, Charles were to arrange a ceasefire with the rebel government, the Confederate Catholics of Ireland, this would both ease the burden on loyalist Irish Protestants, who were being killed in large numbers, and also free his army to come home to England in the Royalist cause. Coming to terms with Irish Catholics was, however, too much for others to stomach.
When Charles indeed signed a cessation of arms with the Confederates, Northumberland was so appalled that he joined the most aggressive Parliamentarians, accepting Scottish intervention as a necessary evil to secure the king’s utter defeat. Equally, for Holland, any compromise with Irish Catholics was anathema and he returned to London and to the Parliamentarian side once more. Four of his fellow defectors would soon join him.37
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