The King's Henchman

by Anthony Adolph

  Among the New Model Army’s leading lights was Oliver Cromwell. Born in 1599 into a family of minor Huntingdonshire gentry, Cromwell is recalled in 1640: ‘his linen was plain, not very clean: and I remember a speck or two of blood… his stature was of a good size, his sword stuck close to his side, his countenance swollen and reddish, his voice sharp and untuneable, and his eloquence full of fervour’.

  Cromwell had been one of the Puritanically-inclined members of Parliament who had followed Pym’s lead in Parliament. In December 1643, however, Pym died ‘with great torment and agony, of a disease… which rendered him an object very loathsome’. His condition was probably bowel cancer.

  In the vacuum created by the demagogue’s absence, Cromwell was rapidly becoming one of Parliament’s leading lights. But it was on the field of battle that Cromwell really excelled.

  Being naturally good both at military strategy and commanding the respect of his men, Cromwell rose quickly to become a general. Royalists quickly learned to fear him. Jermyn’s opinion of Cromwell was unequivocal. Referring to him in conversation once, Jermyn called the Parliamentarian general ‘that great Hell-cat’.

  ‘I can say this of Naseby,’ Cromwell himself was later to state of the events of 14 June 1645, ‘that when I saw the enemy draw up and march in gallant order towards us, and we a company of poor ignorant men, I could not but cry out to God in praises, in assurance of victory.’

  Initially, Cromwell’s confidence in God may have seemed misplaced. A brilliant cavalry charge by Prince Rupert smashed through the New Model Army’s left flank. It seemed that Charles’s Royalists were going to win both the day and maybe the entire war too.

  But instead of rounding on the undefended Roundhead infantry, Rupert decided instead to plunder the undefended Parliamentarian baggage wagons. While the Prince made this foolish blunder, Cromwell himself led the New Model Army’s right flank in a merciless onslaught on the Royalists’ left flank.

  At this critical juncture, Charles had a rare flush of courage, and decided to counterattack. But he was dissuaded from doing so by one of his attendants who physically turned the head of the King’s horse away from the battle. The opportunity was lost and, by the time Rupert and his cavalry returned from their pointless plundering, the Royalist lines had been shattered. It was all Charles and his officers could do to escape the carnage, fleeing west to take refuge at Hereford.

  The hopes of the King and his scattered attendants now turned even more desperately to Jermyn and Henrietta Maria at the Louvre.

  Jermyn’s negotiations with the Dutch were still being held up by the States General. But he had been working hard through correspondence, agents and spies to obtain armed assistance from Ireland.

  The terrible troubles in Northern Ireland are not just a recent phenomenon, but date back centuries. When the English Civil War erupted, Ireland disintegrated into three main factions – Scottish Presbyterian settlers in the north; English Protestant settlers mainly around Dublin, and other English lords who, together with native Catholics led by their tribal chiefs, formed a confederacy at Kilkenny.

  Through tortuous diplomacy, Jermyn secured the Kilkenny confederates to send an army to England to save Charles. This army, however, was hijacked by a Catholic extremist – a papal envoy, no less – who dispatched it instead on an orgy of killing non-Catholics in northern Ireland, resulting in tens of thousands of Presbyterian settlers being massacred.

  It is a massive tribute to Jermyn’s persistence that he still managed to acquire some Irish soldiers for the war. Led by his friend the Earl of Antrim, a small force of Catholic soldiers managed to cross the Irish Sea to Scotland, where they reinforced the army of Scottish Royalists led by the dashing Marquess of Montrose. Supplied with weapons and ammunition by Jermyn’s privateers, the combined army of Scots and Irishmen was initially successful, driving back the Covenanting army and its leader the Presbyterian Earl of Argyll. On Friday, 15 August 1645, Montrose won what appeared to be a decisive victory at Kilsyth.

  When news finally reached the Louvre, Henrietta Maria ordered Te Deums to be sung in church. But on the very day appointed for this, a messenger came galloping into the courtyard of the Louvre. On Friday, 12 September 1645, they were told, Argyll had decimated Montrose’s army at the Battle of Philliphaugh.

  It seemed like every time letters reached Jermyn and Henrietta Maria, they contained news of some fresh catastrophe. A month earlier, on Thursday, 14 August 1645, Sherborne Castle in Dorset fell to the Roundheads. More valuable to the victors than the castle was a portable cabinet containing Lord Digby’s correspondence with Jermyn. In March 1646, while Lorraine’s troops still lounged about uselessly on the Continent, waiting for ships to carry them to England, Parliament published extracts of this correspondence in Dutch.

  Members of the Dutch States General read, goggle-eyed, how Jermyn and their own military leader the Prince of Orange had schemed ‘for the insensible engaging [of] the Hollanders in the war.’ For his part, the Prince of Orange read with astonishment how, although Jermyn had encouraged him to help by promising to make Prince Charles his son-in-law, Jermyn had made exactly the same promise, for exactly the same reason, to Henrietta Maria’s brother, the Duke of Orléans.

  The publication of Jermyn’s letters reinforced the States General’s opposition to any further involvement with the Royalists. The prospect of ever having a Dutch fleet at his disposal dissolved before Jermyn’s eyes. The likelihood of not being able to help Charles regain his throne threw Prince Frederick Henry into a deep depression. A broken man, he died the following year.

  Ireland. France. Holland. Lorraine. One by one Jermyn’s hopes for armed foreign intervention collapsed. And as each desperate day passed, Jermyn knew that the King remained in England, suffering defeat after defeat, the prospect of his regaining the throne growing ever more hopeless. Yet each day, he sat in his gilded office in the Louvre, surrounded by correspondence, ciphers and maps, sifting through reports from his spy network, desperately trying to find a way to save the day.

  There was still one possible, if surprising, source of help: the Scottish Covenanters.

  In 1644, the Earl of Argyll’s Covenanting army had agreed to side against the King in return for Parliament imposing the Covenant in England, thus making Presbyterianism, not Anglicanism, the established church south, as well as north, of the border.

  Even at that early stage, Jermyn had considered outbidding Parliament by trying to persuade Charles to reverse his religious policies and agree to religious toleration for all. By such a means, the Scots could keep their religion, and might also agree to support their King.

  To make his audacious plan work, however, Jermyn had the unenviable task of persuading both Argyll and Charles to cooperate. To achieve this he gained the help of two men, Montereuil and Moray, to act as his representatives in Britain.

  Jean de Montereuil was Mazarin’s ambassador in England and had access both to Charles and to Argyll’s Presbyterian Commissioners in London.

  Aware that the plan to destabilise Charles had now gone too far, but still unwilling to commit to sending troops to England, Mazarin was very keen to support Jermyn’s plan. He readily allowed Jermyn to make full use of Montereuil’s services as a spokesman.

  Jermyn’s other agent, Sir Robert Moray, is one of the most unusual and mysterious characters in the drama of the seventeenth century.

  The son of a Scottish laird, Moray was a deeply spiritual man. He was one of the most prominent intellectual heirs of Francis Bacon, eagerly pursuing scientific experimentation wherever he could – an interest that later led to his becoming a founder member of the Royal Society.

  As a young man, Moray served as a soldier in the French army. He later joined the Scots Covenanting army on its march south to Newcastle in May 1640, when his initiation into Freemasonry was recorded. Ever afterwards, Moray’s signature was accompanied by a Masonic pentagram, coincidentally reminiscent of the two five-pointed stars on Jermyn’s own coat o
f arms. In 1643, Moray’s innate loyalty to the Crown overcame his desire to support the Covenant, and he joined Charles in Oxford, where he met Jermyn.

  After this, Moray went to the Continent where he was captured and held to ransom by an unscrupulous nobleman until Mazarin, probably at Jermyn’s behest, paid for his release.

  Moray’s role in Jermyn’s negotiations was to do what Montereuil could not. Using his web of personal and Freemasonic contacts within the Royalist and Scottish camps, Moray could slip unnoticed between London and Oxford, furtively bringing about an agreement beneficial to Charles.

  By March 1646, Jermyn’s plan had started to work. Moray and Montereuil had persuaded Charles to make a declaration of limited religious toleration in Britain. Moray meanwhile tried to persuade the Scottish Commissioners to declare their support of Charles before all was lost.

  In April, however, when the publication of Jermyn’s captured correspondence caused the prospect of foreign help to melt away like winter snow under the spring sun, Montereuil made a fatal mistake.

  Acting on a misunderstanding, the French ambassador told the King that the Scottish generals had promised Moray they would receive their King with honour. As the Roundheads closed in on beleaguered Oxford, Charles slipped away to arrive unannounced amongst the Covenanters at their camp near Newark on 5 May 1646.

  It was now that Montereuil’s mistake became gut-wrenchingly apparent. Nobody in the Scots’ camp was expecting the King to appear. But far worse than the absence of a red carpet, it quickly transpired that the Scots had never agreed that a mere declaration of religious toleration would suffice to persuade them to fight for the King. They now demanded that Charles should swear to uphold the Presbyterian Covenant itself. The shocked Defender of the Faith refused absolutely. By the time the next post reached Jermyn and Henrietta Maria in Paris, Charles I was no better than a prisoner of the Scottish army.

  After Charles had become the Scots’ prisoner, the only effective Royalist army left in Britain was in the West Country, under the nominal leadership of the sixteen-year-old Charles, Prince of Wales,

  The young Prince, like Jermyn at his age, had the advantage of being both charismatic and attractive. By now a strapping sixteen year-old, he was fast approaching his full height of six feet two inches. His hair fell in lustrous curls over his starched white collar. Large eyebrows curled sensuously above the deep brown Medici eyes he had inherited from his mother.

  Under the merciless onslaught of the Roundheads, even the young Prince’s brave troops fell back through Devon and Cornwall until by August only Pendennis Castle remained. Early that month, Jermyn wrote to his cousin Sir Henry Killigrew,

  My Dear Cousin Harry,

  I have received your [letters], and truly do, with all the grief and respect that you can imagine to be in any body, look upon the sufferings and bravery in them; and do further assure you that the relief of so many excellent men, and preservation of so important a place, is taken into all the considerations… that can be in the Queen to contribute…

  I have only time to tell you, that I am confident those little stores that will give us, and you, time to stay and provide more, will be arrived with you; and I do not so encourage you vainly, but to let you know a truth that cannot fail… already some money is at the sea-side for this purpose, and more shall daily be sent… God of heaven keep you all, and give us, if he please, a meeting with you in England. I have no more to add. I am, most truly,

  Your most humble and faithful Servant,

  He[nry]. Jermyn

  But Jermyn’s supplies arrived too late. He never met Harry Killigrew again in England or indeed anywhere else. Starved of food and ammunition, Pendennis capitulated on Monday, 17 August 1646. Although its defenders were allowed to leave, Harry Killigrew died shortly afterwards of a wound received during the siege.

  Even before this disaster fell, desperate efforts were being made to rescue as many of the royal children from England as possible. They were only partially successful. James, Duke of York, would remain a prisoner of Parliament until 1648, when two friends of Jermyn’s Freemasonic contact, Sir Robert Moray, spirited him over the Channel, disguised as a girl.

  His brother Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, the prince who had been born under Jermyn’s watchful eyes at Oatlands in the troubled summer of 1640, remained under house arrest until Parliament finally let him join his mother in France in 1650.

  Poor Princess Elizabeth, Henrietta Maria’s second daughter, was a prisoner in the Isle of Wight, where she was destined to waste away in grief until consumption put a final end to her loneliness in 1650.

  A happier fate lay in store for little Henrietta Anne, the baby born in 1644 in Exeter. Her guardian Lady Dalkeith disguised the baby as a boy and, evading the Roundheads’ clutches, reached the Louvre in August 1646. From then on, the happy gurgles and squeals of the little princess made the corridors of the rambling palace seem much less empty.

  Prince Charles and his household had escaped too, whisked away in fast ships across the bright sea to Jersey. Besides Cornet Castle on neighbouring Guernsey, Jersey was now the only piece of the King’s domains left in Royalist hands, and was destined to remain so until its fall in 1651. Jermyn, who was its governor, had scraped together enough money to garrison and supply the island’s stronghold, Elizabeth Castle. But he could still not be confident of the Prince’s safety there. Dark fears of Parliamentarian warships surging across the Channel to capture the Prince filled Jermyn and Henrietta Maria’s minds, and they wrote to him, urging him to come to Paris at once.

  But this was not part of the plan of his chief counsellor, the brilliant lawyer and statesman Sir Edward Hyde, Chancellor of the Exchequer, the implacable enemy of Jermyn.

  Jermyn and Henrietta Maria were, in fact, equally concerned that Hyde had already turned the very impressionable Prince Charles against them, and added extra weight to their desire to bring him to Paris. For his part, Hyde was anxious not to lose – and to Jermyn, of all people – the political clout he exercised through his custody of the Prince of Wales. Hyde’s ingenious lawyer’s response was that, if the Prince left Jersey, the remaining Royalists would all lose heart and admit defeat.

  Knowing this was Hyde’s ruse, Jermyn and Henrietta Maria repeated their orders. They also sent Hyde a letter that Charles had sent the Queen bidding her ‘send mine and thine own positive commands to him [Prince Charles] to come to thee… [he] should be now with thee in France’. But stubborn Hyde refused even these and subsequent orders.

  In mid-June, 1646, Jermyn set out from Paris in his customary black satin suit, with long-nosed George Digby, his poets D’Avenant and Cowley, seventy-eight other Royalists and countless servants and baggage wagons. At Courtainville in Normandy they squeezed themselves into six ships and sailed across the narrow strait to Jersey.

  On Saturday, 20 June, the harbour below Elizabeth Castle reverberated with cannon-fire and trumpet-blasts to salute the arrival of Henry Jermyn, Governor of Jersey. Waiting to meet him at the quayside was Chancellor Hyde, and by his side the excited young Prince of Wales.

  After lengthy arguments in the grand counsel chamber of Elizabeth Castle, Hyde still refused to back down. In the end, Jermyn and Digby simply marched the Prince onto their ship and left Hyde behind. Disconsolate at his loss, Hyde was genuinely concerned at what bad influences the profligate Jermyn and Catholic Henrietta Maria might have on the heir to the throne.

  He passed his time growing cabbages, writing his history of the Civil War and spreading a story that Jermyn was planning to sell Jersey to France in return for a dukedom and £200,000 to line his own pockets – a story that seems without foundation. Jermyn may have loved his soup and gold, but he was not nearly as avaricious as Hyde believed him to be.

  What is beyond doubt is that Jermyn had been right to overrule Hyde. That July, the King wrote to Henrietta Maria:

  tell Jermyn, from me, that I will make him know the eminent service he hath done me concerning Pr. Charles
his coming to thee, as soon as it shall please God to enable me to reward honest men.

  But for now, Charles I was in no position to reward anyone. The King of England was a prisoner of a Scottish army on English soil. And Jermyn and Henrietta Maria knew it was down to them to save him.

  XII

  ‘THE LOUVRE PRESBYTER’ 1646 – 1649

  If he were ever affected with melancholy, it was in considering what religion to be of, when that which he professed [Presbyterianism] was so much discountenanced that he was almost weary of it; yet few men were so often upon their knees, or so much desired to be thought a good Protestant by all parties which professed that Faith, and could willingly comply with all of them, and yet took time of the Roman Catholics to be better informed.

  Sir Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, on Jermyn.

  Young Prince Charles’s dark complexion was inherited from his mother, but his height and build were startlingly different from both the King and Queen. Throughout his life, there were rumours that Prince Charles was really the son of the equally tall, well-built Lord Jermyn. What was beyond speculation was that, from 1646 onwards, Jermyn took on the fatherly role towards the Prince of Wales that the imprisoned Charles I was now unable to fulfil.

  From now on, it was Jermyn who administered Prince Charles’s finances and allowed him pocket money out of his French pension. It was Jermyn who delicately tempered Henrietta Maria’s instinct to pamper and cosset her son and checked the adolescent lad’s instinct to rebel against her.

  It was Jermyn, too, who appointed Prince Charles’s tutors and decided what they should teach him. He became the boy’s friend and tried to encourage and protect the Prince through the traumatic years ahead. He became, in a very real sense, the boy’s father.