The White King

by Leanda de Lisle

  The war party in Parliament was now in the ascendant. Pym was dying of cancer and he looked ‘a sad spectacle’. Even so, he had worked hard to complete the negotiations with the Scottish Covenanters. In return for their military intervention Parliament agreed that every Englishman over the age of eighteen would sign a new Solemn League and Covenant. Under this, Scotland’s established religion–Presbyterianism–was to be imposed on both England and Ireland.

  The Scots entered the English civil war in January 1644, when troops under the Earl of Leven crossed the river Tweed. In an effort to reach out to Parliament, and prevent a civil war across the three kingdoms, Charles summoned all his MPs and peers to assemble for a parliament at Oxford, where they could debate a way forward. Most of the House of Lords and about a third of the Commons came. But those who remained in London, knowing the Scottish army gave them military superiority, spurned the Oxford parliament’s efforts at renewed peace negotiations. Holland had little influence. His reputation with Parliament would never recover from his period in Oxford. Instead of peace the spring brought a new campaigning season, more battles and further bloodshed.

  Henrietta Maria was pregnant and ‘weary not only of fighting’, she told a friend, ‘but of hearing of it’.38 On 29 March 1644, Charles’s duelling young cousin, Lord John Stuart, was killed at the Battle of Cheriton near Winchester. This Royalist defeat ended all hope of a successful assault on London and it meant that Parliamentarian forces would soon focus an attack on Oxford. Henrietta Maria wanted to leave for somewhere safer to have her child.

  Charles said goodbye to his distressed wife on 17 April at Abingdon, eight miles from Oxford. Holding her in his arms, he comforted her, saying, ‘madam, extreme remedies are requisite for extreme evils’. It all seemed so unreal to Henrietta Maria that she recalled, ‘I found myself ten leagues distant from him before I became conscious that I had left him.’39 She stayed in hiding for over two months, travelling from town to town. It was a difficult pregnancy and sometimes she was in such pain she believed she was dying. Eventually, Charles asked their trusted doctor, ‘for the love of me… go find my wife’. The old man was with her when her baby girl was born at Exeter on 16 June. ‘I thank God my wife is well delivered,’ Charles confided in Prince Rupert.40 As ‘for the christening of my younger and, as they say, prettiest daughter’, he instructed Henrietta Maria that ‘it should be in the Cathedral [of Exeter] if the health of my little baby will permit it, and in the same way of the Church of England as all the rest of my children have been’.41 His wishes would be carried out on 21 June, when their daughter was christened Henrietta, in the presence of her servants.

  Henrietta Maria had fled the city. With Essex’s army approaching she had been forced to abandon her newborn infant. France now seemed her best option. Richelieu had died in 1642 and Louis XIII in May 1643.42 Anne of Austria was regent for the five-year-old Louis XIV. She was sympathetic to her fellow queen and had already lent Henrietta Maria £20,000.43

  On 13 July Henrietta Maria wrote to Charles from the coast at Falmouth. ‘Adieu, my dear heart. If I die believe that you lose a person who has never been other than entirely yours.’44 She was described by one witness as presenting ‘the most woeful spectacle my eyes yet ever beheld’.45 Once again the Earl of Warwick sent ships to pursue her. This time they fired a hundred cannon shot on the queen’s little fleet.46 She would not permit Charles to make compromises to save her life if she was captured so she ordered the captain of her ship to blow the gunpowder in the hold if they were overrun. Happily for all on board, her ship escaped. Henrietta Maria was rowed ashore at a wild, rocky cove in Brittany, half blind, suffering symptoms of what may have been tuberculosis, and in agony from a breast abscess. With her bedraggled court of England ladies, her favourite Henry Jermyn, and her dwarf Jeffrey Hudson, she must have looked, she later recalled, more like a distressed wandering princess from a romance than an actual queen.

  Yet as Henrietta Maria made her slow progress towards Paris she was greeted in town after town with the same grand ceremony with which she had left France in 1625. Cannons were fired, and she was processed beneath golden canopies, along streets lined by crowds anxious to cheer this brave daughter of Henri IV.

  She stopped to take the spa waters of Bourbon-l’Archambault to try and gather strength.47 Anne of Austria’s former favourite Mme de Chevreuse was also in the town, but now Anne was ruling France, she saw Chevreuse in the same light as Richelieu had: as a troublemaker. Henrietta Maria was asked privately not to ‘receive the visits of a person at variance with Her Majesty’ and so she politely declined Chevreuse an audience.48*

  Henrietta Maria reached Paris in November and commissioned a silver ship as a gift for the Cathedral of Notre Dame to thank God for her survival crossing the Channel.49 But she remained ‘very weak and ill, like one in a deep consumption’.50

  It was twenty years since Henrietta Maria had last lived in the Louvre. Then, she had been wholly French. Now, she hung her rooms with English Mortlake tapestries and her servants were British. She had changed–and so had France. The government had become increasingly centralised and autocratic under Louis XIII and the taxes needed to support the war with Spain were heavy. These taxes would become all the more resented now France was under the rule of two foreigners–the Habsburg Anne and her chief minister and rumoured lover, the Italian-born aristocrat Cardinal Mazarin.

  It was, however, events in Britain on which Henrietta Maria remained focused. Despite her ill health she would continue to raise arms for her husband, while looking for rich brides for their sons. She sent Charles most of the income Anne of Austria gave her and assured him, ‘although I am well treated here that will not prevent me from desiring to return to England. I have there what I have not here, that is YOU.’51

  Henrietta Maria would, in fact, never see Charles again. ‘I ought never to have left the king my lord and husband,’ she later reflected to their eldest son.52 What Charles faced, he would have to face without her.

  * When Henrietta Maria reached Nevers in October 1644, her dwarf Jeffrey Hudson challenged the brother of the captain of her guard to a duel. The weapons chosen were pistols on horseback. The cavalier didn’t take it seriously, and arrived armed only with a giant squirt with which to ‘extinguish’ Hudson and his powder. Hudson shot him in the head. Henrietta Maria had raised Hudson since he was seven years old, when he had sprung out of a pie, eighteen inches high and perfectly proportioned. At Henrietta Maria’s request he was spared execution for murder, though he was obliged to leave her household. She would never see him again. He was captured at sea by Barbary pirates and he was to spend the next twenty-five years as a slave. His freedom from his Muslim captors was then purchased along with those of other English slaves. In England, however, he was imprisoned for his Catholic faith in 1676, and though eventually released in 1680 he died only two years later.

  17

  ENTER OLIVER CROMWELL

  THE GREATEST BATTLE OF THE WAR SO FAR WAS ABOUT TO TAKE place at Marston Moor in Yorkshire. On 2 July 1644 an Anglo-Scottish army of 30,000, under the Scottish Earl of Leven and Parliament’s Earl of Manchester, faced 20,000 Royalists under Charles’s nephew, Prince Rupert, and a former governor of the Prince of Wales, William Cavendish, Marquess of Newcastle. It was said that Newcastle was of ‘no religion, feared neither God nor the Devil, believed neither in heaven nor hell’.1 He had a reputation for fighting with utter fearlessness. When a battle was over, however, he would retire to his music and ‘his softer pleasures’, refusing to be disturbed ‘upon what occasion ’soever’.2 This could be awkward for junior commanders, whom he had a record of ignoring for two days at a time. Nevertheless, he inspired the devotion of his men.

  The low open countryside of the moor’s battleground was ‘the fairest ground for such a use as I have ever seen in England’, a soldier recalled.3 The armies were laid out ready for the fight almost like the toy model armies Charles had played with as a boy: infantry in the middle, a
nd cavalry in the wings. The weather, however, was unseasonably cold. It had been a day such as this for the Battle of Towton during the Wars of the Roses: winter ice clinging to heather in summer bloom. The shattered bones of the Towton dead still lay under Yorkshire soil, waiting to yield up their terrible evidence of slaughter and desperate violence: pulverised skulls and forearms cut where they had been raised in self-defence from merciless blows in a guerre mortelle–a battle to the death.

  The usual preliminary for a battle began at Marston Moor late that afternoon with a Parliamentarian bombardment. It stopped at 6 p.m. to be succeeded by the rich sound of men singing psalms. When a hailstorm broke, Rupert and Newcastle retired for supper in their carriages. The singing also ended. It seemed the day was to end peacefully and battle would come in the morning. Then at 7.30 p.m., beneath the staccato of raining ice, a deep rumble began. The Roundhead cavalry of the Eastern Association was moving down a low hill ‘in the greatest order and with the greatest resolution that ever was seen’, under the command of their forty-five-year-old general, Oliver Cromwell.4

  Oliver Cromwell was a descendant of a sister of Henry VIII’s ruthless vicar general, Thomas Cromwell. The family had changed their name from Williams and Oliver sometimes referred to himself as ‘Cromwell aka Williams’. A gentleman born, Cromwell was nevertheless not a rich man, and before the war he had lived more like a yeoman. There had been periods of depression and he had thought himself to be ‘a chief, the chief amongst sinners’. Everything had changed on the day he became convinced he was ‘among the congregation of the first born’, one of God’s elect predestined for heaven, despite his sins.5 This certainty had inspired him to powerful religious preaching, and this in turn had earned him a place in Parliament as MP for Cambridge. There, in the Commons, his passion and self-assurance had ensured he stood out from the crowd.

  One fellow MP remembered first noticing Cromwell at the beginning of the Long Parliament in November 1640. ‘I vainly thought myself a courtly young gentleman,’ the MP recalled, and ‘came into the House well clad’. Cromwell was speaking on behalf of a servant of William Prynne–the Puritan whose ears had been cropped for sedition after he had suggested the queen was a whore.6 Stocky and balding, with a thick nose, Cromwell was dressed in a ‘cloth suit, which seemed to have been made by an ill country tailor. His linen was plain and not very clean; and I remember a speck or two of blood [from shaving] on his little [neck] band, which was not much larger than his collar’. Cromwell was nevertheless a striking figure, above average height, a ‘sword stuck close to his side: his countenance swollen and reddish: his voice sharp and untunable and his eloquence full of fervour’. By the time he had finished speaking ‘one would have believed the very government itself was in danger’, were Prynne’s servant not to be forgiven his indiscretions.7

  Cromwell had ‘no ornament of discourse, none of those talents which use to reconcile the affections of the bystanders’.8 But his sense of mission ensured that, when it mattered, and the hour came, ‘he was to act the part of a great man’.9 Before Charles had raised his standard at Nottingham, and while others dithered, Cromwell had moved decisively, recruiting men and seizing the arms stored at Cambridge Castle. As the war got under way he ‘had a special care to get religious men into his troop’. He did not care whether or not they were orthodox Protestants and he was equally unconcerned with the social rank of his officers. ‘I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else,’ he once wrote. It sounds romantic, liberal even, but many of his men were judged fanatics.

  Moderate Puritans balked at the fervour they found in Cromwell’s cavalry. ‘Proud, self-conceited, hot-headed sectaries had gotten into the highest places and were Cromwell’s chief favourites,’ one Parliamentarian officer complained.10 Cromwell’s own commander, the forty-two-year-old Manchester–who had purged the clergy in the eastern counties of Laudian clerics, and personally ordered the destruction of crosses and other ‘superstitious images’–viewed them with equal distaste, expressing dismay at this ‘swarm’ of those ‘that call themselves the godly: some of whom profess they have seen visions and had revelations’.11 At Marston Moor, however, Cromwell’s sectaries had their opportunity to show their fighting worth.

  As the rumble of Cromwell’s advancing cavalry grew to a roar there was panic in the dozing Royalist camp. Then the tall, slender figure of Rupert was seen with his white hunting poodle Boy, dashing for his horse. He shouted at his confused cavalry, ‘Do you run? Follow me!’ They did as they were asked, mounted their horses and attacked the Roundheads with gusto. ‘Cromwell’s own division had a hard pull of it: for they were charged by Rupert’s bravest men’, one Parliamentarian recalled, and the two sides ‘stood at swords point a pretty while hacking at one another’.12 Cromwell was injured in the neck and forced to leave the field bleeding heavily, but the Scottish regiments halted the ferocious Royalist advance and Cromwell’s men then killed Rupert’s horse from under him.

  With Rupert and Cromwell out of action on the east wing, the Royalist cavalry on the right wing was cutting through the Roundhead lines. They were supported by Newcastle’s ‘Whitecoats’, foot soldiers in undyed uniforms–men Henrietta Maria had known during her months in the north. For one Royalist the noise of battle was such that ‘In the fire, smoke and confusion of that day I knew not for my soul whither to incline.’13 Sir Thomas Fairfax’s cavalry regiments were put to flight, and the whole of the allied Roundhead–Covenanter third line and two regiments of the fourth also broke, some without firing a shot. Almost half the allied army was now on the run, including the men under Sir Thomas’s father, Lord Fairfax, over half the Scots and Manchester’s regiment of foot. The Royalist northern horse chased the enemy for miles and the news spread that the Royalists had won the day.14 But the remaining Scottish regiments withstood the Royalist charges, and after Cromwell’s cavalry had gone to the aid of the allied right wing the battle began to turn. Rupert remained trapped behind enemy lines, unable to act as the general he was and give direction. Newcastle, who had arrived late on the field, was reduced to fighting almost as an ordinary officer. By nine o’clock Cromwell’s men could boast, ‘we had cleared the field of all our enemies’.

  Newcastle escaped, but the Whitecoats were trapped against hedgerows. They died where they stood in ranks and files, the last of the wounded lying on their backs thrusting their weapons at the horses that rode over them. Only thirty survived. Fleeing Royalists were chased to within a mile of York, a full moon allowing the killing to continue for hours, and their bodies were left scattered along three miles of road.15 ‘God made them as stubble to our swords,’ Cromwell remarked with satisfaction. Manchester felt differently. He asked his men to thank God for their victory. But the slaughter–worse than any battle since 1642–had convinced him there was little that was holy in this terrible civil war.

  The next day, the sun rose on a grim spectacle: ‘thousands lay upon the ground, dead and not altogether dead’.16 Bone-white corpses twisted in unnatural shapes lay stripped of clothes and valuables, their stillness contrasting with the frantic activity of the living. Lord Fairfax had lost his younger son, Charles, while his elder son, Sir Thomas, had his face cut open with a sword slash. Lord Fairfax’s own role had been less courageous than that of his children. Having fled the field he had remained away from the battle. Now he had his men hunting down the Royalist ‘colours’ (the flags representing the honour of the individual Royalist units). He sent to London ‘so many as upon a sudden we could as yet receive from the soldiers, who consider it a credit to keep them’.17

  Prince Rupert had, liked Newcastle, escaped capture, but his white dog, Boy, had not been so fortunate.

  The great hunting poodle whelped by Puddle had become legendary after appearing in a Royalist spoof on a Puritan pamphlet entitled ‘Observations Upon Prince Rupert’s white dog called Boy’. Printed in 1643, it had followe
d an earlier poem about Boy, also designed to poke fun at the Puritan determination to root out popish ‘superstitious’ practices, expressed in what the Royalist pamphleteers judged the Puritans’ own superstitious fears of witchcraft. According to the spoof pamphlet Boy was Rupert’s familiar and had magical powers that made the Prince bulletproof. These Royalist jokes had, however, backfired. On the eve of the Battle of Newbury in September 1643, Roundhead soldiers had killed a local woman as a witch, believing she was working for Rupert. There were Roundheads who had taken the stories about Boy as evidence that Rupert–and even the king–really were in league with the Devil.*

  When Rupert’s horse was shot from under him, Boy was seen bounding after his master, but he never made it to the bean field where Rupert had hidden. The Roundheads crowed that it was a magic bullet, fired by a Puritan soldier ‘who had skill in necromancy’, that had brought Boy down. Numerous woodcuts were printed depicting the poodle’s lifeless body, often by the bean field. In some a witch stands over the dead dog, weeping as if he were her own child.18 Boy was gone, but, it seemed, witches remained.

  In Oxford bonfires were lit to celebrate the Royalist victory that had come so close at Marston Moor.19 It was days before the truth of their defeat filtered through: the king had lost the north. The Parliamentarian press reported Rupert had renamed Cromwell ‘Ironside’, reputedly after a flanking attack on Cromwell’s cavalry that had failed. It was from this that Cromwell’s troops gained their famous sobriquet the ‘Ironsides’.

  The Parliamentarian Earl of Essex did not rejoice at this Parliamentarian victory, however: the achievements of rival generals, in contrast to his own weak performance, were reducing his influence and his popularity had waned dramatically. In London graffiti depicted him as a lazy glutton, with a glass of wine in his hand. He needed desperately a victory of his own. He was now on his way west, heading into Cornwall, the most Royalist county in England. Charles, who had been in the Midlands, followed him. A victory in June, at the Battle of Cropredy Bridge in Oxfordshire, had already restored Charles’s fortunes in the south. Now, in the far west, the two armies fought for eight days in Cornwall’s thick hedgerow country. Essex’s army was squeezed and squeezed until it had little room or life left.