Charles I at the time of his trial
A series of mica overlays chart the life and death of Charles I on a portrait miniature
Charles’s coronation (note red robes not white)
Charles at war
Charles’s executioner is masked here with fishnet, and in similar contemporary images
On Charles’s death monarchy is abolished and in the background of this image the crown is broken
Henrietta Maria as a widow
A pearl earring said to have been worn by Charles I at his execution
St George’s Chapel, Windsor, where Charles I is buried
Frontispiece of the Eikon (pronounced ‘icon’) Basilike or ‘Royal Portrait’ depicts Charles giving up his earthly crown for that of a martyr
POSTSCRIPT
UNLIKE HIS FATHER, CHARLES WAS NOT A WORDSMITH. HE WAS neither a keen author nor an enthusiastic public speaker. His was a cinematic imagination and his eye encompassed far more than the pictures he hung on his walls. He had used the visual–a theatre of ceremony, ritual and beauty–both at court and in church, to reform and shape a socially deferential, hierarchical society that was appropriate to divine-right monarchy and sacramental kingship.
A deferential society suggests to us a slavish fawning to snobs with an unearned and unjustified sense of superiority. Today we strive to create a ‘meritocracy’ in which people are able to achieve their potential through their own efforts. There is, however, another perspective. A meritocracy also suggests that those who are not successful have less merit than those who excel; and that those who have success owe nothing to luck, or the help of the less successful, but only to their own efforts and brilliance. Ours is a self-congratulatory system that also fosters a sense of entitlement.
The hierarchical society Charles imagined was underpinned by Christ’s example of self-sacrifice. Everyone owed service, both to those above them (commoner to noble, noble to king, king to God) and to those beneath them, to whom they owed a duty of care. This included protecting the weak, and promoting the talented and the brave. That was the theory. Charles wanted to make it a reality. It was not a contemptible ambition. It was, however, an ambition that he failed spectacularly to achieve, and therein lies his tragedy.
Charles was, in his private life, ‘the best master, the best friend, the best husband, the best father’.1 He was both loving and loved. Yet Charles distrusted appeals to the emotions, in part because he had absorbed his father’s lessons concerning the dangers of ‘populism’ (by which he meant demagogy), but also because he had no instinct for it. He was unable to act spontaneously: to let his spirit and passions pour out to the wonder and terror of his subjects. He found people difficult to read and his inability to interpret their actions and feelings often left him angry and frustrated. Form and order mediated relationships in a way he was comfortable with. Equally, any challenge to form and order felt extremely threatening.
Charles accepted that there were great benefits to working with Parliament, but, like his father, he never really appreciated its significance to the English people. Nor was he able to overcome his instincts, trust more to his MPs, and to his own power to control and intimidate them, accepting the compromises and slights to his regal authority that the messy business of politics sometimes required. He was always self-righteous–but rarely ruthless.
The fallen king was remembered as having had a ‘compassion of nature which restrained him from ever doing a hard-hearted thing’.2 His enemies, fearful of the reversals to Calvinism during the Thirty Years War, and believing they were fighting for its very survival, had no such compunction.
The new media of pamphlets and news-sheets, sermons and political speeches, all helped to build a narrative that would justify rebellion and foreign invasion as a necessary defence against ‘popery’, with godly peers and their Puritan allies whipping up ethnic and religious hatred to create a climate of fear. Targeted and organised mob violence was used to intimidate English MPs, and misogynistic attitudes to women helped demonise Henrietta Maria as the papist-in-chief. From slashing the ‘popish’ pictures in her chapel, it would be just a short step to slash the faces of the ‘popish whores’, the laundry women and wives in the Royalist baggage train at Naseby.
Not all Royalists cared, however, for the image of a saintly and merciful ‘white king’. It was all very well to rely ‘wholly on the innocence of a virtuous life’, but, they pointed out, it had exposed Charles ‘fatally to calamitous ruin’.3 His failure to punish London for the lynching of Buckingham’s astrologer Lambe in 1628 had only encouraged further violence, since it demonstrated that ‘the king had rather patience enough to bear such indignities than resolution to revenge them’. Similarly the riot in St Giles’s Kirk in Edinburgh against the Scottish prayer book in 1637 might not have paved the way to the Bishops’ Wars, ‘had the king caused the chief ringleaders of these tumults to be put to death’.4 Archbishop Laud’s description of Charles, written in the aftermath of Strafford’s execution in 1641, was perhaps the most damning of all Royalist criticism: ‘a mild and gracious prince who knew not how to be, or be made great’.5
It is worth remembering, however, that while flinching from cruel acts may be a political liability, it is not a moral weakness. Even as the fighting began Charles sought order amidst the disorder, finding time in the weeks after Edgehill to read and make suggested changes to his collection of quarto texts by Beaumont and Fletcher, controlling characters and story in a way he could not control his subjects in life.* But Charles was becoming courageous, resilient, and increasingly hard-nosed. He showed remarkable skills of leadership during the civil war and inspired great loyalty. Parliament had control of London and the majority of England’s wealth and population. For a time, they also had the backing of the Scots. Despite these advantages it took four years for them to defeat Charles militarily. ‘He was very fearless in his person’ in battle, and had shown equal courage on the grindstone of captivity.6
Imprisoned from 1646, Charles never gave up the struggle to get the best terms possible for his restoration as king. In his last negotiations with Parliament before Pride’s Purge, his final sticking points remained his consistent refusal to betray his God by denying episcopacy, or his brothers in arms by giving up his friends to punishment. Until the last day of his trial he hoped he could yet strike a deal. He had always underestimated the ruthlessness of his enemies.
Parliament had by then become a monster that devoured its own. The old Puritan William Prynne, who had been cropped of his ears in the 1630s and had acted as the prosecution lawyer against William Laud, was one of the MPs purged in 1648–considered too moderate, too accommodating to Charles for the tastes of the New Model Army and their friends. Prynne even became something of a Cavalier hero in the years ahead, as the British kingdoms became subject to a virtual military dictatorship.
Today Charles’s principal legacy is the Church of England, with its royal governor bishops and choral music, and which even in our secular age, and to many non-Anglicans, remains interwoven with the culture of this kingdom. At St George’s Chapel, Windsor, a wreath is laid during evensong every year on the anniversary of Charles’s death. The banners of the Garter knights hang above the stalls as choral music is sung in remembrance of the former sovereign of the Order. A flawed prince, but also principled and brave, Charles had been a better exemplar of a chivalric knight than he ever was a king.
* Charles was more interested in plays than is commonly realised–as well as less prim. He contributed to the creation of the plot of James Shirley’s racy play The Gamester and loved the results when it played at court in 1634. Percy Simpson, ‘King Charles I as Dramatic Critic’, The Bodleian Quarterly Record, Vol. VIII, No. 92, pp. 257–262.
APPENDIX
LUCY CARLISLE AS MILADY DE WINTER
BUCKINGHAM’S EMBASSY TO FRANCE IN 1625 AND THE TRADE WAR with France of the following year provide the complex political and diplomatic background to a number of fictional sto
ries and gossip, often taken as fact, which helped inspire Dumas’ The Three Musketeers.
Taken together the earlier accounts–some dating back to the late seventeenth century and other nineteenth century forgeries of seventeenth century memoirs–describe a plot by Richelieu to destroy the reputations of Buckingham and the queen consort of France, Anne of Austria. The origins of the story lie in Buckingham’s courtly attention to Anne in 1625. Lucy Carlisle is presented as so jealous of his compliments to Anne that she agrees to work for Richelieu. Lucy is to steal some diamond pendants Anne had given to Buckingham, and which Anne had taken from a necklace that had been a gift from her husband, Louis XIII. Lucy seizes her opportunity during a ball at Windsor. Buckingham is wearing his Garter sash pinned with Anne’s diamonds. Lucy, dancing with him, surreptitiously cuts off two stones. When Buckingham discovers the theft he guesses what is being plotted. As Lord High Admiral, he shuts the Channel ports. Buckingham has new stones cut in time for Anne to appear at a ball wearing the full necklace, and Richelieu’s plans are thwarted.1
In Dumas, this story is repeated with Lucy’s part reinvented in the character of the fictional Milady de Winter. In reality the only diamonds we know were given to Buckingham in France came from Louis XIII.2 And far from being deadly enemies, Buckingham remained on good terms with Lucy ‘Milady’ Carlisle, although the same cannot be said of his relations, who detested her.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
WRITING A ONE-VOLUME BIOGRAPHY OF CHARLES WAS A DAUNTING prospect and I couldn’t have managed it without help. I am particularly grateful to Dr David Scott for reading a messy draft and commenting on it with patience and generosity. Since I didn’t feel I could force him to read it a hundred times, and I work by a process of writing and rewriting, I may have swapped old errors for new ones, for which, of course, I am alone responsible. I am also grateful for conversations and email contacts I have had with other historians. John Adamson (who drew my attention to Lucy Carlisle), Sarah Poynting (with whom I have swapped transcripts, and who is editing a book on Charles I’s writings), John Guy, Peter Marshall, Desmond Seward, and Erin Griffey have shown much kindness and support.
Thank you also to archivist Peter Foden for his invaluable help with transcriptions and some translations, and to my friend Dominic Pearce for his crucial help with other translations, and also to my father-in-law, Gerard de Lisle. The staff at the British Library and London Library are always extremely helpful, and I would particularly like to mention those at the London Library’s Country Orders Department who post me books or email me scanned pages, and make a huge difference to my working life. I would further like to thank my supportive and very patient editors Becky Hardie, Penny Hoare, Clive Priddle and David Milner, as well as my ever wonderful and incredibly efficient agent, Georgina Capel.
I am extremely grateful also for the generosity of the Duke of Rutland, who granted me permission to research from his incredible archives, to Sir William Dugdale and others who also granted me access to previously unrecorded royal letters and to the Earl and Countess of Denbigh for allowing me to photograph some of their remarkable Stuart relics. To Philip Mould for the images he freely lent me, to Florence Evans of the Weiss Gallery, to Dominic Gwynn of Goetze and Gwynn, to Simon Wright and the Sealed Knot Society, and also to the owner of Charles I’s saddle, who rarely allows the publication of any images of this royal relic from the battlefield of Naseby. Finally, I would like to thank Tracey Doyle and Janette Herbert for their huge support during times of family illness, as well as Flick Rohde and Nicola Vann.
Leanda de Lisle is the highly acclaimed author of The Sisters Who Would Be Queen, After Elizabeth, and Tudor. She has been a columnist on the Spectator, Country Life, the Guardian, the Sunday Telegraph, and the Daily Express, and writes for the Daily Mail, the New Statesman, and the Sunday Telegraph. She lives in Leicestershire, England.
ALSO BY LEANDA DE LISLE
After Elizabeth: The Death of Elizabeth and the Coming of King James
The Sisters Who Would Be Queen: The Tragedy of Mary, Katherine and Lady Jane Grey
Tudor: The Family Story
NOTES
Abbreviations
BL British Library
CSPD Calendar of State Papers, Domestic
CSPV Calendar of State Papers relating to Venice
HLRO House of Lords Record Office
HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission
MHS Massachusetts Historical Society
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
PRO Public Records Office
TNA The National Archives
Author’s Note
1. Sir Simonds d’Ewes quoted in Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell, The Murder of King James I (2015), p. 9; David Nichol Smith, Characters from the Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (1918), p. 9.
Preface: Venturous Knight
1. For the best introduction to the Reformation and the Wars of Religion, see Peter Marshall’s The Reformation, A Very Short Introduction (2009), and for the full story of the English Reformation see his Heretics and Believers (2017).
2. The Reform churches had followed the beliefs of Huldrych Zwingli and later of John Calvin.
3. The origins of the term Huguenot is uncertain. They had been behind a generation of civil wars that had culminated in Louis XIII’s Huguenot father, Henri de Bourbon, becoming heir to the French throne. Since Parisians were prepared to fight to the death rather than accept a Protestant king, Henri had converted to Catholicism before he was crowned as Henri IV. ‘Paris is worth a Mass’ were his apocryphal words.
4. In England the Reform Protestantism introduced by Henry VIII’s son, Edward VI, had been swept away on his death by his Catholic half-sister Mary Tudor. If she had had children, rather than the Protestant Elizabeth as her heir, it was highly likely England would have remained Catholic under them.
5. James also feared Jesuit claims made in ‘A Conference on the Next Succession’ (1594/5) that monarchy was essentially elective and that the Tudor monarchy was a clear example of this.
6. Godfrey Goodman’s history of James’s court describes a Privy Council meeting that took place only hours after Elizabeth’s death in 1603. There was a discussion on the wording of the letter the council was to write to James. Cecil produced a note composed by the 2nd Earl of Essex, ‘written to some private friends, that when the time came the King of Scots might be accepted with some conditions’. Those at the meeting who supported a motion to limit the king’s powers were outvoted. For more on this see Leanda de Lisle, After Elizabeth (2005), p. 131.
7. CSPD 12 addenda (407).
8. Julia Pardoe, Life and Memoirs of Marie de’ Medici (1852), Vol. III, p. 218.
9. With around 20 million people, the population of France was almost three times larger than that of England, Scotland and Ireland put together.
10. In 1610 Henri IV had been poised to intervene in a dispute over the succession in two territories within the Holy Roman Empire. Although a Catholic, Henri had been supporting two Protestant candidates against the choices of the Bourbon dynasty’s European rivals, the Habsburgs. His carriage had come to a halt in a narrow Paris street when a tall, red-haired man leapt onto the wheel by his window. The heavy leather curtain had been pulled back and the man reached in and stabbed Henri twice in the chest. The king was dashed back to the Louvre, but was already dead by the time he arrived. ‘What we saw beggars description,’ witnesses reported. ‘The whole court shocked and stunned with grief, standing silent and motionless as statues.’ Henri IV’s widow, Marie de’ Medici, was with Louis, weeping, and nearby his corpse was lying on a bed. The torture and the details of execution of the murderer, François Ravaillac, are too horrible to describe, even in this book, in which there are many horrible deaths. Bibliothèque nationale, Charles de la Roncière, Catalogue des manuscrits de la collection des Cinq-Cents de Colbert (1908), pp. 12ff, 64–96; Oeuvres d’Etienne Pasquier (1723), Vol. II, col. 1063–4.
&n
bsp; 11. Baron Edward Herbert of Cherbury, The Life of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (2012), p. 37.
12. Letters of King Charles I, ed. Sir Charles Petrie (1935), p. 8.
13. As Queen of England Henriette-Marie would be known for a short time as Henry, and thereafter as Mary.
14. Letters of King Charles I, ed. Petrie, p. 9.
15. Ibid.
16. They had taken rooms at an inn on the rue Saint-Jacques. Today it is a backstreet in the Latin Quarter. Then it was one of the main roads out of Paris. Cherbury, p. 45.
17. CSPV 1619–21 (576).
18. By the end of the century Protestantism would be reduced to a mere fifth of Europe’s land area.
Chapter 1: ‘Dearest Son’
1. Bishop Hackett quoted in Philippe Erlanger, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham (1951), p. 49.
2. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, quoted in David Nichol Smith, Characters from the Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (1918), pp. 12, 13–14, 15.
3. Come the New Year, James rewarded Anna (only he called her Annie) with a fabulous jewel worth 1,333 Scottish pounds; Leanda de Lisle, After Elizabeth (2005), p. 71 and notes.
4. Thanks to Erin Griffey for this reference: Frederick Devon (ed.), Issues of the Exchequer (extracts of the Pell Records, Order Books of James) (1837), p. 10.
5. CSPD 1603–10 (264).
6. Sir Philip Warwick, quoted in Smith, p. 53.
7. Pauline Gregg, Charles I (2000), p. 295.
8. Thanks to Erin Griffey for this reference and information: Devon (ed.), Issues of the Exchequer, p. 48.
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