While the king did little, the soldiers were electing representatives or agitators, and formed the Army Council to take charge of their own affairs. Before long, the Army was at odds with Parliament. The analogy of continuing the work of reformation slid over from Church thinking into political thinking. It was true – or was it? – that Charles had been neutralized, but was Parliament turning out just as tyrannical? ‘King Charles his seventeen years misgovernment before this parliament … was but a flea-biting, or as a molehill to a mountain, in comparison of what this everlasting Parliament already is’, complained one newsbook.
Like any good and sane officer, Cromwell was disturbed by the rise of radical opinion within the New Model Army. Certainly, he did not want to see the victors deprived of their wages, and he was keen to represent them thus far against timid men of Parliament. It occurred to him to make use of the captive king. In secret, a man called Joyce appeared at Holdenby, at dead of night, and asked to speak to the king. Charles said he wasn’t going to speak with anyone at that hour and Joyce had to cool his heels till morning. But Charles did get up before his usual time, performed his morning devotions, and sent for Joyce. ‘What’, he asked, ‘are your instructions?’
‘There they are, sir’, said Joyce, pointing to his troop of horse.
‘Your instructions’, said Charles, ‘are in fair Character, legible without spelling.’ He made plans for departure. Before long, he was at Newmarket, where Cromwell and Henry Ireton waited for him. There was an offer on the table – later to be known stolidly as the Heads of the Proposals – and it was generous. Ireton was offering almost complete religious toleration – no obligation to take the Covenant, no Presbyterian Church. The existing Parliament would be dismissed and new Parliaments summoned every two years; these would not sit for long, for no more than 240 days. A Council of State would participate in foreign affairs, and there would be a general amnesty.
It sounded good, but Charles still hoped for more. As recently as March, he had written ingenuously, ‘I am endeavouring to draw either the Presbyterians or the Independents to side with me for extirpating the other so I shall be really king again.’ His hope to be ‘really king again’ evidently meant no compromise. He had also told Henrietta Maria that he planned to drive a wedge between Parliament and the Scots, and he had heard intelligence reports of unrest in Scotland and in London which made him unduly hopeful. He rejected the Heads of the Proposals summarily. His counsellor Sir John Berkeley asked him tartly if he had some secret weapon for winning the war that he had failed to inform his advisers about. And like many people, he didn’t take to Ireton. Ireton was far too frank, not deferential enough. But for the Army, Charles had ceased to be a person, or a king. He was a criminal, a man of blood, ‘over head and ears in the blood of your dearest friends and fellow commoners’. Cromwell and Ireton were, increasingly, taking a risk in treating with Charles at all.
Cromwell had to deal with the Army, who were threatening a march on London unless their demands for pay and rights were met. On 2 August they drew up on Hounslow Heath, and members of both Houses rode out to meet them. There were great cries of ‘Lords and Commons and a free Parliament!’ Six leading Presbyterians, including Denzil Holles, left the House to the Independents; more Presbyterians withdrew when Cromwell and a regiment of horse arrived in Westminster.
Charles too was heading for London, at a more leisurely pace than the Army, being escorted, but lightly; no question of iron bars or a cage. He saw his younger children again at Maidenhead. They had been left behind, pathetically, when the king and queen had fled London, and had been prisoners of Parliament, first at St James’s, then at a house in the city from 1642. Parliament had had thoughts of using them as hostages, and although it never came to anything, they couldn’t help knowing that they were powerless prisoners. Henry, who was seven, could hardly remember his father, whom he had last seen at the age of two, and didn’t recognize him. Charles spoke gently to him: ‘I am your father, child, and it is not the least of my misfortunes that I have brought you and your brothers and sisters into the world to share my miseries.’
After that, Charles met his two small children much more often, and they may well have had an impact on his thinking, planning, plotting. His occasional hesitancy about escape plans may have been partly due to a reluctance to abandon them, even for good reason – to abandon them as he had been abandoned, as he had already abandoned them once.
He usually saw them at Syon House, once Lucy Hay’s home, and he also met his nephew the Elector Palatine. And there were a few halcyon days at Hampton Court; Sir Thomas Herbert remembered it as a last golden age, in which the king was attended by chaplains, accompanied by nobles, sustained by the visits of his children.
Charles’s visitors knew they were seeing the end of something they loved, the presence chamber, the monarchy as itself. Warm-hearted Ann Fanshawe was in tears when she paid her third and last visit to the king at Hampton Court. Charles’s farewell to her showed an awareness of both possible endings of his small story: the romantic and the tragic. Ann wished him a long and happy life, and Charles affectionately stroked her cheek, saying, ‘Child, if God pleases, it shall be so, but both you and I must submit to God’s will, and you know in what hands I am in.’ He gave Richard a bundle of letters for Henrietta Maria, and promised that ‘if ever I am restored to my dignity, I will bountifully reward you for your service and sufferings’.
The problem was that this last golden era made Charles feel happy and relaxed and confident and blessed. Everything was just the way it ought to be. Who could ever imagine that it could be truly different? So he felt able to reject the Parliament peace terms in September. He tried to string them along by telling them that the Heads of the Proposals could be the basis for peace. But then he forgot to suggest further concessions. While negotiations were paralysed, the Army radicals improved the time, addressing their growing congregations, disseminating their new and exciting ideas to an audience primed for change.
Charles was frightened by what he heard of the debates within the Army, especially when they were formalized at Putney and the Army commanders actually listened to what the radical elements had to say. Everyone was talking about An Agreement of the People, the astounding series of demands made by the Army radicals which sought to give ordinary men a voice in government. The world it sought to create was one Charles could hardly imagine. At this point Charles was not alone in failure of the imagination. No one could feel confident, now, about the ending of what was being acted out, or who was writing the play. Perhaps, Charles thought, he was caught in a tragedy, with himself as black-clad melancholy hero, a role he had enjoyed when young. He felt sure he would be poisoned if he stayed at Hampton Court. He had already received a mysterious warning letter. Could he convert a tragedy to a romance? He made a plan to be a romantic hero – he would escape.
Knowing Charles’s hopes, Jane Whorwood consulted William Lilly, the London astrologer and Royalist, to learn where Charles should go to be safe. At first, Lilly would not let her in, because a member of his household had plague. Resolutely, wittily, Jane made a joke of her own scarred face: ‘It is not plague I fear,’ she said, ‘but pox.’ Lilly let her in after all, and carefully casting a horoscope, he calculated that the safest and best place for Charles was in Essex, twenty miles from London.
‘She liked my judgement very well,’ he wrote afterwards, ‘and being herself of a sharp judgement, remembered a place in Essex about that distance, where was an excellent house, and all conveniences to be acted upon.’
Charles’s daughter Princess Elizabeth had come to stay for a few days. She had always been a delicate little girl. Born on the ill-omened Feast of the Holy Innocents, in 1635, she is a serious little creature in Van Dyck’s portrait of the royal children. She was one of the fair-haired and blue-eyed members of the family, like James, and unlike the swarthy, gipsy Prince of Wales. She had huge eyes in a face made elfin by illness. She was clever, learning Latin, Greek a
nd Hebrew, and she was pious too; she and her sister Mary enjoyed the Catholic regalia their mother gave them; Mary had a tiny rosary which she would whip out when she thought no one was looking. But although clever, Elizabeth was a pawn, to be pushed about by the powerful. Now, none too scrupulously, Charles himself used his daughter’s visit to further his own plans for escape. He told Colonel Edward Whalley, captain of the guard, that the thudding footfalls of his men walking their beats at night was keeping the nervous young Elizabeth awake. So the guards were moved away. Charles always went to his room early to write letters on Thursday and Friday; leaving by a back stairway, he slipped out of Hampton Court on 11 November 1647. It was raining, it was cold. A boat was waiting to take Charles across the river to Thames Ditton; his servant stood by on the opposite bank, with horses. They rode off into the gathering darkness.
Then next morning, Charles’s Groom of the Bedchamber tried to keep Whalley out, saying that the king was still asleep. When Whalley eventually forced his way in, he found the bed empty. Charles’s dog whimpered in a corner; his master had abandoned him. He had also left two letters, one of which was a simple thank-you note to his gaolers, the other explaining to Parliament his reasons for going. Charles had seen pastoral plays, and had read romances like Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, in which aristocrats are forced to take to the forest in disguise, but then break out gloriously to the joy of their people. ‘Let me be heard with Freedom, Honour and Safety, and I shall instantly break through the clouds of retirement, and show myself ready to be Pater Patriae’, he wrote.
First, though, he became lost in Windsor Forest. He wandered through it for hours, baffled, angry, defeated by his own terrain. He hadn’t meant to become the hero of a roman d’aventure, but the protagonist of a pastoral, something smooth and civilized, providential. When Charles and his servant finally reached the inn at Bishop Sutton, where they were to change horses, they found that the local Parliamentarians were using it as a meeting-place. Where should he go? To Essex, as Jane Whorwood had suggested, and thence to the Continent? Or to London, to place himself at the head of the moderates?
Both might have worked. Either might have changed the course of history; would the former have prevented the Restoration or enabled it sooner? Would the second have brought the Civil War to the streets of London? Led by Charles in person, might an alliance of Royalists and Presbyterians have succeeded in controlling events?
Probably not. But the potentialities were never tested. Charles, who had always hated London, but who couldn’t bring himself to give up his kingdom, chose neither London nor France. Instead he decided on the Isle of Wight, an emblem of his indecision rather than a way of resolving it. He could go to the Continent from there, or to London. This may have been his worst mistake, worse even than fleeing London at the beginning of the war, worse even than rejecting Ireton’s terms. Ann Fanshawe knew he was not in a romance plot, but in the plot of a tragedy – among plotters, in fact. For her, the servants who helped Charles were guilty of folly (‘to give it no worse name’), drawn in by ‘the cursed crew’ of the Army. She meant the Army rebels; she too found them terrifying.
Charles waited at Titchfield, across the Solent from the Isle of Wight. The king sent his servants to feel out the governor of the island, Colonel Robert Hammond. Charles felt sure he’d be sympathetic, but it is hard to see why. Hammond was a veteran of Essex’s army, one of the men to whom things seemed clear in 1642 and opaque by 1646. He wasn’t comfortable in the New Model Army as he had been under the earl. He had asked for the job on the Isle of Wight in the hope that he might stay out of the mess he felt sure would follow the war. But Hammond was no Royalist. He had fought for three years with Essex and seen many a good fellow die. Given Hammond’s hostility, it was fatal that Charles sent Sir John Berkeley as his messenger to him, for Berkeley bungled it badly. Asking Hammond whether he knew who was near him, Berkeley rushed into speech: ‘Even good King Charles, who is come from Hampton Court for fear of being murdered privately.’ Hammond, astonished, pulled himself together, and suggested that they should go to the king together. He promised to treat him with ‘honour and honesty’.
Charles had been restless and anxious, and had begun looking for a boat to France, but the ports had been closed on news of his escape. When he heard that Hammond himself was at his door, he panicked. ‘Oh, Jack!’ he cried, ‘thou hast undone me! For I am by this means made fast from stirring.’
Now he had no choice but to travel to the island. He reached Cowes the same day, and stayed the night at the Feathers Inn. Above the king’s bed hung a text. ‘Remember thy end’, it said. He went on to Carisbrooke Castle in the centre of the island. A woman thrust a damask rose into his hand, plucked from her own garden in midwinter; she promised him her prayers.
Sir John Oglander was most impressed. He was a staunch Royalist and feared that the island would be a trap for the king, but he was also delighted when Charles was able to visit his house. There were a few odd little signs that Charles was being pushed into closer relations with his subjects than ever before. One day Charles’s coach passed a funeral procession, and the king asked whose it was. It turned out to be Sir James Chamberlain, a Royalist who had died of his war-wounds. Charles dismounted at once, and joined the mourners. In a letter, he praised the islanders, ‘very good, peaceable and quiet people’.
Hammond had at once got in touch with the Army Command’s search parties.
The Army Command had found the note Charles had left, and the letter warning him that he might be murdered if he stayed in their custody. Who had sent it? What if Cromwell and his supporters had done so, to drive a wedge between Charles and the Army? Could Charles have forged it himself? Or was the note from a genuine Royalist? Charles had succeeded in giving his enemies a divisive mystery to solve.
In any case, Charles soon settled in at Carisbrooke, and in due course reopened negotiations with both Parliament and the Scots, reaching a secret agreement with the latter almost at once; three years of Presbyterianism in exchange for another army. The agreement was so secret that it was buried in lead in the castle grounds by the end of December. Charles tried to avoid giving Parliament a firm no, but the commissioners wouldn’t leave the island without knowing his mind. By this time, Charles had more-or-less abandoned any façade of hoping for peace by negotiation, and had set his face for more war.
XXVIII A New Heaven and a New Earth: Anna Trapnel and the Levellers
Looking around them, the people of England in particular could see what the war had cost them: the ruined houses, the empty food stores, and the uncounted dead, killed in battle or by disease. There was now to be a breathing-space for those tired of battles, though it was to prove brief.
By 1647, it seemed to many that the genie of change could not now be forced back into the bottle. Little as anyone liked it, the world had changed, truly changed, and no one could change it back. But others kept trying to bring back the old days, because they had not changed. Robert Herrick’s lyric collection Hesperides staunchly refused the floodtide of war and change. Herrick wrote about maypoles and weddings, church ales and hock-carts; he evoked the lavish, decorated, customary world that had now been obscured by the simple elegant black pall of Presbyterianism. Royalists were learning what the press could do. They created rough, robust jest-playlets, about Mistress Parliament vomiting up stupid laws in the throes of childbirth, about Cromwell smuggling his mistress into the palace, thus cuckolding General Lambert, about the Devil persuading Parliament to do his will. These were signs that people missed the theatres, and in 1647 a group of London actors formed and began acting plays at the old Cockpit and at the Red Bull. They were told to stop, but begged the House of Lords for permission to carry on. They were refused. But they did not stop, performing in secret. They were actors; what else could they do? The main result was a spate of raids on theatres; seats were broken and spectators fined for attendance at renegade performances. The old days could not come back; some would not allow the
m to. When the Earl of Essex died unexpectedly from a stroke in September of 1646, Parliament had given him a handsome and expensive funeral, and a funeral effigy which portrayed him in his buff-coat and scarlet. Just five short weeks later, a poor farmer from Dorset hacked the statue to pieces. He gave as his reason that an angel had ordered him to destroy a statue which insulted God by bringing the image of a man into a place of worship. This stoutly Independent act was hardly reassuring for those Presbyterians for whom Essex had represented moderation. Moderation was not the theme of the moment.
These two acts of iconoclasm, the destruction of theatres and the smashing of the Essex statue, were representative of the ascendancy of the Independents. They were not a majority in any institution or organization except the Army. Perhaps they were not even a majority in any town or city. But they made their views known through a bold willingness to challenge anything that ran up against their opinions. They were immeasurably strengthened because they had now achieved their aim of winning the war. True, they did not quite command the Commons, but they were more numerous than they had been. While the Long Parliament had been sitting, its members had been reduced by old age and illness, forcing elections, some of which were contested, and some of these resulted in the installation of MPs more radical in their opinions than those chosen when Parliament was first summoned. Men like Henry Marten, now restored to the House, and also republicans like Edmund Ludlow and Thomas Chaloner. Ideas that had once been unthinkable and certainly unsayable were now held by a significant, vocal and very active minority, which could reasonably credit itself with having won the war.
While the Army was in ferment, London’s godly churchgoers were in uproar; and the two groups of agitators were intimately connected, though they did not altogether overlap. Victory brought the New Model Army to God. William Dell, preaching to the New Model in June 1646, claimed that ‘I have seen more of the presence of God in that army, than in amongst any people that I have ever conversed with in my life … For he hath dwelt among us, and marched at the head of us, and counselled us, and led us, and hath gone along with us step by step from Naseby.’ Even a captured Royalist opined that ‘God was turned roundhead’. The same confidence inspired the radical churchgoers of London, who had suffered so under Laud, and they rapidly became more radical still. Presbyterianism was no longer enough for the Independents. They removed ecclesiastical authority altogether. Learning – and especially an Oxford degree, once a passport to a clerical living – became hated signs of Royalist sympathies. Priests and vicars were replaced by preachers and lecturers – ‘mechaniek’ preachers, as Presbyterians said in horror, meaning that they came from artisanal backgrounds. These unqualified people would address congregations – not in churches, but in meeting halls, since it was icon-worship to think any building especially holy – for hours at a time, or as the spirit moved them. The same Holy Spirit might motivate listeners to reply at equal length; this usually involved a detailed account of the speaker’s dreadful sins, then an account of how salvation had come through the direct promptings of the Spirit. Through this process, it came to seem normal to many members of London radical sects to be addressed by people who had no particular qualifications, people who would not get a hearing in the Commons, in town meetings, or in trade guilds. It even came to seem meritorious that a speaker had no qualifications: a sign of purity and even of election. The Bible said that ‘the last shall be first, and the first last’. The London sectarian congregations were the template for all the radical politics that were to follow. They too were inspired by Biblical promises that distinctions would disappear in the presence of Christ. They were defending themselves against the Presbyterians, those compromisers who wanted to let the king exercise the powers that had, in Independent eyes, brought the nation to bloody ruin. They had an open structure, too, which itself served as a model for the removal of layers of hierarchy in other arenas. If bishops and priests could very well be abolished, why did anyone need kings and magistrates?
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