The White King

by Leanda de Lisle

  The fifty-seven-year-old Holland ‘was so weary and shaken in his joints that he had a better will to his bed than his horse’. He retired for the night in a local inn. Just before dawn their pursuers caught up with them. A cry went up amongst the Cavaliers: ‘To horse! To horse!’ Buckingham fought his way out with 200 of his horsemen. Around twelve Cavaliers were killed and the rest were captured. Holland was taken at the inn. His captors claimed that he had taken so long over his elaborate toilette that they had caught him still in his underclothes.26 Amongst the personal effects they confiscated was his George–the insignia of the Garter–with its blue ribbon and badge of St George killing the dragon.

  The punishment for turncoats was harsh in this second civil war.* Holland’s life, however, was spared, so ‘that he may turn round once again’, an enemy report observed sarcastically.27 The fact his brother Warwick was the Lord Admiral of the Parliamentarian navy had helped to save his life, for the time being. Yet Holland remained unrepentant. From prison he consoled his wife and daughters, ‘where there can be no shame let there be no sorrow’.28 The Independents and the army were governing by ‘power, not love’, and with ‘a rod of iron’.29

  ‘It is Scotland, and Scotland only can save the king and England,’ a friend now wrote to Lucy Carlisle.30 The long-awaited invasion had at last arrived, with a Scottish army of 4,000 horse and 10,000 foot crossing the border into England.

  * Christmas had been banned in Presbyterian Scotland in 1640. The English Parliament had done so in June 1647, when Easter and Whitsun were also abolished. The celebrations of Thanksgiving in the United States and Hogmanay in Scotland are reminders that Christmas was not celebrated amongst the Puritan settlers in America or amongst Presbyterian Scots until very modern times. In the United States Christmas only became a public holiday in 1870, in Scotland not until 1958.

  * A previously unrecorded letter by Henrietta Maria kept in a private archive in Warwickshire offers an example. Written 3 August, it requires free passage out of France for Sir William Dugdale (who is carrying dispatches to England), his men and baggage.

  * In Wales former Parliamentarian officers were court-martialled and shot. Later reports indicate that this was also the fate of a former quartermaster general to the Earl of Essex, a Dutchman called Dolbier, captured at St Neots.

  Part Four

  NEMESIS

  22

  THE RED-HAIRED MISTRESS

  IT RAINED CONSTANTLY, BREAKING THE WHEAT IN THE FIELDS, clinging to clothing, dripping down Carisbrooke’s stone walls. Charles was a physically energetic man, and he suffered, he admitted, from this ‘base imprisonment, cooped up’. The only person with whom he had private contact was the illiterate woman who emptied his stool pan. It was she who smuggled his private letters. He wrote one to Lucy Carlisle after the disaster of St Neots on 9 July 1648. She had been accused of being responsible for the discovery of his escape attempts, and he was reminded that in the past she had ‘proved faulty’. Nevertheless, he said, ‘I think she now wishes well to me.’1 Indeed, she proved her worth. Despite the failure of the southern rising, she was working to persuade the Parliamentarian Vice Admiral William Batten to defect to the Royalists along with his ship, the Constant Warwick. It would not be long before she succeeded.

  Meanwhile, Charles had received a letter from a red-haired spy who was angling to become his mistress. A striking, ‘tall, well-fashioned and well-languaged gentlewoman with a round visage’, Jane Whorwood was thirty-eight and had a full life behind her.2 She had survived smallpox and a violent husband before taking on the dangerous role of a Royalist agent. She had helped plot the king’s escape attempts in the spring and was now staying in the local town of Newport. Charles was intrigued by her suggestion of an assignation. He had been, by royal standards, an extraordinarily faithful husband and he still loved Henrietta Maria. He wore her portrait always, keeping it in a case behind his George. But he enjoyed sex and missed it now.* He had not seen Henrietta Maria for four years: he knew he might never do so again. So when Jane wrote that she wished to ‘satisfy’ her ‘desires’, Charles was anxious to oblige.

  This was not to be a public love affair that would produce acknowledged bastards and threaten the legitimate succession of the Prince of Wales. It would be a brief sexual encounter, of a kind he had been willing to commit when he was young and chasing a she ‘who must not be named’.3 ‘Sweet,’ he told Jane, ‘there is one possible way that you may get a swiving [fucking] from me.’ While he was having dinner the stool-pan woman could smuggle Jane into the privy which was in his bedchamber. He estimated ‘I shall have three hours to embrace and nip you’ before the spies who acted as his servants returned. A few days later he suggested another plan. She should arrange to dine in the castle with one of the officers. He would then come in by surprise, ‘and between jest and earnest get you alone into my chamber and smother Jane Whorwood with kisses’.4 These planned encounters were, for the time being, just a desperate fantasy. The endgame was approaching.

  Two days after St Neots the Royalist holdout at Pembroke Castle in west Wales fell, and Oliver Cromwell marched north to confront the Scots. He was certain God would grant him victory. His allies in Westminster were less sanguine. The royal fleet and the Prince of Wales were in the Thames Estuary and Royalist feeling in London was running high. On 12 July several of the ordinary Royalist prisoners brought from St Neots were freed by a London mob. The pressure from the City for an unconditional treaty with the king was overwhelming, and on 28 July MPs agreed to hold negotiations without preconditions.

  Charles was watched more closely than ever. Still, his messages to Jane continued. He sent two on 17 August, the same day as Cromwell’s Ironsides met the Scottish and English Royalist forces at the Battle of Preston in Lancashire. The Scottish infantry was poorly armed and poorly trained. Nor was there much trust between the Scots and their former enemies in the English Royalist army. Nevertheless, they fought ferociously before their forces broke. At least 1,000 men died in the battle and its aftermath. Over 4,000 were taken prisoner.

  As Cromwell marched on to Edinburgh and further victory, the besieged town of Colchester lost heart at the news from Preston and capitulated. Fairfax accepted the surrender on 28 August. The Royalist commanders, Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle, were then informed they were to be shot. They had given their word at the end of the first civil war that they would not take up arms again. In breaking their promise they had forgone any right to quarter. They were led into a yard where three lines of musketeers made up the firing squad. At the first volley of fire Sir Charles fell dead. Lisle ‘ran to him, embraced and kissed him’. Lisle then turned to the musketeers and asked them to move closer, so they wouldn’t miss him. One of them said, ‘I’ll warrant you, sir, we’ll hit you.’ Lisle smiled and said, ‘Friends, I have been nearer when you have missed me.’5 A second volley of gunfire followed, and his body fell.*

  The short-lived blockade of the Thames Estuary also ended. The Royalist navy had proved to be so riven by dissent as to be virtually useless. The Presbyterian–Royalist faction (which included the queen) had wanted the ships to take the Prince of Wales to Scotland and to have placed him at the head of Hamilton’s army. Others had preferred the fleet to go to Ormonde in Ireland, where there were those loyal to an episcopalian Church of England. Having failed to engage an inferior Parliamentarian squadron, the Royalist navy returned to Holland.6

  The war of the Engagement had ended with the New Model Army the victor in England and Scotland. But Ireland remained under arms and the vast majority of ordinary people in England and Wales still wanted a peace that would see a return to a king ruling with Parliament. Fear of the all-conquering and embittered soldiery of the New Model Army made Charles’s agreement to peace terms all the more desirable. To gain his co-operation, MPs once again relaxed the conditions of his imprisonment.

  The day after Colchester’s surrender, Charles was permitted to spend time alone with Jane and take from her w
hat comfort he could. Over the following fortnight he was allowed to see her several further times. Jane left the Isle of Wight shortly before the formal treaty negotiations opened at Newport on 15 September. Charles wanted her in London to monitor the mood in Westminster and the City while he and the parliamentary commissioners hammered out the terms of his restoration.

  Charles sat for the negotiations on his throne under a canopy of state, flanked by several of his former councillors: his cousin, the Duke of Richmond, who had lost three younger brothers in the first civil war; the Marquess of Hertford, Royalist brother-in-law of the late Earl of Essex; the Earl of Southampton, at whose house Charles had been captured; and the Earl of Lindsey, whose father had been killed at Edgehill.

  Those who had not seen the king since he had escaped Hampton Court were shocked by his appearance. His hair had turned completely grey and ‘he had sorrow in his countenance’.7 The terms Charles was now required to agree to were draconian. He would have to accept responsibility for the war, and also the abolition of episcopacy; he would lose the militia; and Parliament would have control of court appointments.

  Charles remained determined, however, to push back, even against seemingly impossible odds. He had been writing a justification of his actions for years. These papers had been professionally edited, rewritten, expanded and supplemented by a clergyman called John Gauden. Charles was now revising and approving the developing work. It was to be called ‘The King’s Sigh, or the Royal Plea’. At the end of September Charles alerted his publisher to prepare for publication.8 Meanwhile, Ormonde was working successfully towards a treaty that offered generous terms to Ireland’s Catholics in an effort to build a Royalist coalition. The possibility of facing a united Irish army of Catholics and Protestants, backed by the Prince of Wales’s navy, was a horrifying prospect for the New Model Army. Charles hoped that this threat would strengthen his hand.

  The New Model Army was, however, no longer interested in negotiation. Charles’s flight from Hampton Court, so breaking his parole, and the subsequent war of the Engagement, had united generals, officers and men in a resolution that he should now face some kind of formal reckoning. On Monday 13 November Jane sent a courier from London with an urgent warning for Charles. The army had prepared a Remonstrance demanding that Charles be tried, along with his elder sons, on a charge of making war on the people.9 On 20 November the army presented its Remonstrance to Parliament, just as Jane had predicted. The document came close to demanding that Charles be executed, calling for ‘exemplary justice… in Capital punishment upon the principal author… of our late wars’.10 This Remonstrance did not, however, have the backing of the English people. It was laid aside by Parliament, with MPs implicitly rejecting its demands for a trial.

  Charles believed the army would now react as it had when Parliament had angered the soldiery the previous year. They would seize him from Carisbrooke, just as they had seized him in June 1647 from Holdenby. Only this time his fate would be less comfortable.

  On 28 November the treaty negotiations were suspended and Charles took formal leave of the parliamentary commissioners in the town hall at Newport. He had accepted thirty-eight of Parliament’s demands. But he maintained absolutely his promise to support episcopacy and his refusal to give up his supporters to the block. The negotiations on such matters were expected to continue, but Charles’s farewell speech foresaw no such future. He told the commissioners that he did not believe he would see them again, and that he was ready to submit to what God ‘shall be pleased to suffer men to do with me’. The end of the ‘old known ways’ of a king ruling with his Parliament was approaching. In this, he warned, they too faced danger: ‘My Lords, you cannot but know that in my fall and ruin, you see your own.’11 Many of those present wept.

  He wrote to the Prince of Wales the next day. Charles advised his heir to seek peace and told him that when he became king he should never take more power than he needed for the good of his subjects: ‘These considerations may make you a great prince, as your father is now a low one.’12

  A new detachment of soldiers arrived at Carisbrooke in howling winds on the night of 30 November 1648. Word immediately reached Charles that the army planned to move him. Richmond and Lindsey did their best to persuade Charles to flee that instant, but he refused point-blank. There was something undignified in trying to escape yet again and he was doubtful that an attempt would succeed. The arresting officers came for him before breakfast the next morning. They did not say where he was being taken. He was simply told to bid farewell to Richmond. Both king and cousin were visibly distraught.

  Charles was taken by carriage to the coast and then by boat to the sea-swept fortress of Hurst Castle. Marooned on a spit, it was ‘a dismal receptacle or place for so great a monarch’.* The rooms prepared for the king were so small and dark that he needed candles from midday. He managed, however, to write to his daughter Elizabeth, who had been pleading with him for news, a reminder that beyond politics there was a family. ‘It is not want of affection that makes me write so seldom,’ he explained to his daughter. ‘I am loath to write to those I love when I am out of humour lest my letters should trouble those I desire to please.’ He had nothing much to say, he added, ‘but God bless you!’ He asked her to send her little brother Henry another blessing from him ‘with a kiss’.13

  Although the peace terms Charles had agreed fell short of what had been hoped by MPs, Parliament confirmed on 5 December that they offered the basis for further negotiations. This was not what the army wanted to hear. One night, Charles heard a drawbridge fall, and wondered if his long-expected assassin had at last arrived.14 The army, however, was otherwise occupied. At 7 a.m. on the blustery morning of 6 December 1648, army regiments were on the streets shouting for Londoners ‘to go home and look to their shops… and their wives’.15 By 8 a.m. soldiers were stationed in New Palace Yard, Westminster Hall, the Court of Requests, and on the stairs and lobby outside the House of Commons. Others patrolled nearby streets.

  Arriving MPs walked up the stairs to the Commons to find Colonel Thomas Pride flourishing a list of MP’s names. He was an officer trusted by Fairfax, Cromwell and Ireton and was acting on their orders. Those on the list were taken away under guard. William Prynne, who had had his ears cropped for his long-ago attack on the queen, was indignant when Pride barred his way, reminding the colonel ‘that he was a member of the House and was going into it to discharge his duty’. Prynne pushed up a couple of steps before Pride and others soldiers overwhelmed him. He was then dragged away, shouting that it was ‘a high breach of the privileges of Parliament’.16 Other arrested MPs demanded from the army chaplain, Hugh Peter, by what power they were held. The answer was blunt: ‘By the power of the sword.’17

  On 14 June 1647, the army’s Declaration to Parliament had demanded an election to clear out ‘corrupt’ MPs. There had been no such election. Ireton, who had also composed the army’s Remonstrance of November 1648, believed that these ‘corrupt’ MPs had threatened the safety of the English people by their willingness to negotiate with an untrustworthy king. It was this supposed threat to public safety that justified the army’s purge of MPs. With that carried out, it was now necessary that Parliament’s authority be reasserted and that Charles accept the institution’s absolute primacy in a public trial. But to achieve that required more than just the seizure of Parliament–the army also needed to seize the City. What followed was the manipulation of qualifications for voting and office-holding in London. This transformed the balance of power in the municipality towards the Independents and radicals.

  Charles was moved again, arriving at Windsor on 23 December. It must have been painful for the king to see the changes in the Garter chapel there. He had, over the years, commissioned an array of gorgeous religious plate, which had all since been broken up as idolatrous. The treasures had included a prayer book with a golden cover. On one side it had depicted the ‘the king healing the Evil’: a miraculous sign of his status as God’s represente
d on earth. On the other side there had been an image of the Angel of Incense from Revelation, who turns the prayers of the saints (‘thy kingdom come’) into the fire that destroys the earth. This boasted the ancient heritage of the Church of England, the prayers of its adherents dating back to the first Christians and the Apostles from whom his bishops claimed descent.18

  Charles did his best to honour the banned feast of Christmas. He dined on 25 December under a canopy of state and dressed in a new suit. There were no traditional mince pies or plum puddings, however, and he read the service himself from the banned Book of Common Prayer.

  Elsewhere, Ireton and other army leaders were discussing their plans for the king’s fate. There was agreement that Charles had to be brought to trial ‘and Hugh Peter did very gravely show the necessity for it’.19 It was hoped that Charles would submit to the proceedings and in so doing effectively accept the superiority of Parliament. There were rumours in London that the Parliamentarian Earl of Denbigh had gone to Windsor to explain to Charles that his life would be spared if he agreed to be a powerless monarch.20 If Denbigh was there, however, Charles never saw him.

  The courtesies due to an English monarch were now stripped from Charles as a mark of his diminished status. It was ordered that he should no longer be served on bended knee and the number of his servants reduced.21 The principal compiler of ‘The King’s Sigh’, Dr Gauden, had meanwhile added an essay on Charles also being denied his chaplains. The collection of Charles’s edited and expanded writings were being hastily renamed the Eikon Basilike–Greek for ‘Royal Portrait’.22 It was as if he were already dead. Charles was not, however, resigned to martyrdom and ordered a hold on publication.