by Jordan, Don
To ensure the king would not abuse his powers, laws were invented, including a contract between the king and the people. If the king forgot his duty to the people, the people could break their contract with the king. To put a limit on the king’s power, the people decided to create parliaments, for ‘the Parliament was set as a bridle to the King’.9
Finally, Milton turned his cold eye on Charles himself:
what hath a native king to plead … why he after seven years warring and destroying of his best subjects overcome and yielded prisoner, should think to [e]scape unquestionable as a thing divine, in respect of whom so many thousand Christians destroy’d should lie unaccounted for, polluting with their slaughtered carcasses all the land over and crying for vengeance against the living that should have righted them?
Was Milton present at the king’s trial? We don’t know; but he was making the arguments that were not made publicly during the trial. Because Charles refused to recognise the court, John Cook had been unable to deliver his prepared justifications for the trial. Though the trial has often been criticised, Milton’s arguments reveal the actions of the Rump Parliament and the king’s judges in a clearer light, as indeed did Cook’s own arguments when they were published shortly after the trial.
Milton’s contention that kings could be deposed was extremely controversial at the time. The king’s authority was seen as the bedrock of a peaceful and ordered society – Charles had argued as much during his trial. Other powerful minds agreed: the philosopher and social theorist Thomas Hobbes for one. When Hobbes saw how the country was hurtling into civil war in 1641 he quickly reworked and strengthened a treatise he was writing on government and had it circulated.10 Contrary to Milton, Hobbes maintained that once the people passed power to a ruler, it should stay there. His reasoning was that if a ruler could be deposed, society might collapse into anarchy at any time.11 As he was famously to write, life would be ‘nasty, brutish and short’.12 Hobbes’s concerns proved only too real – the social breakdown he feared came to pass in civil war. But while Hobbes was a timid man, inherently scared of conflict, others embraced it, seeing it as the only way to resolve the power struggle between king and Parliament. Interestingly, during the Prince of Wales’s early exile in Paris, Hobbes had briefly been his tutor, specifically engaged to teach him mathematics. It would not have hurt either party that they shared a belief in absolute monarchy.
At The Hague in early 1649, the young Prince of Wales suddenly became a significant figure in European politics. While dealing with his grief, he also had to decide how to win back his father’s crown. It would become apparent to Charles that most continental powers would wait to see which way the wind was blowing. This meant that the immediate choice of countries from which to try to launch an invasion was limited to Ireland and Scotland. Due to the Stuarts’ two-hundred-year association with the latter, it seemed the better option. The prospective king would try his luck there. As for England, he would hope that widespread shock at the overthrow of the country’s ancient certainties would prepare the ground for a triumphant homecoming.
Since the beginning of the Civil Wars, propaganda had played a major part in the fate of the Stuarts. The war of words had begun during the early 1640s when newspapers blossomed in England. The conflict brought about a huge surge in the production of pamphlets extolling the virtues of the opposing sides and lambasting the vices of their enemies.
The sparkling royalist news sheet Mercurius Aulicus (Court Mercury) was a good example. It made its first appearance in Oxford at the beginning of 1643, disseminating news about King Charles’s war effort. But its genius lay in satirising the opposition. This was a breakthrough in contemporary journalism. Before Mercurius appeared, news sheets had restricted themselves to publishing the news in a more or less factual manner. Now, they let go of reality and lampooned the enemy.13 Mercurius was printed in Oxford and smuggled into London to undermine parliamentary support at a penny a time.14
News sheets played an important role in the propaganda war on both sides. The parliamentary paper Mercurius Britannicus scored a propaganda coup when it published Charles’s private papers, captured at the Battle of Naseby in 1645. These revealed the king’s plans to bring foreign mercenaries and an Irish (i.e. Catholic) army to fight against Parliament.
One of the oddest pieces of parliamentary propaganda was a tract by Francis Cheynell, a Presbyterian radical. Cheynell conjured up an imaginary horror state ruled by Charles II – surely a preposterous eventuality!15 Between 1647 and 1650, some fifty different titles were published, both royalist and parliamentary, with more than five hundred actual editions.16 Wives were not exempt from satirical attack: Elizabeth Cromwell and Lady Fairfax were portrayed fighting over which of their husbands should be king.
In the face of changing fortunes, royalist propagandists decided to home in on one man – Oliver Cromwell. His military successes had marked him out as the man to watch. His appearance was a gift to these early satirists; his lank hair, rugged features and facial warts were exaggerated to portray him as an uncouth, untrustworthy type. Propaganda made the jump from satire to the advocacy of murder in 1645. An edict appeared that purported to come from the Prince of Wales in exile, calling for some gallant to murder Cromwell. This communication, most likely a forgery, was intercepted by Parliament’s intelligence chief, John Thurloe.17
In their efforts to render him ever more unattractive, royalist satirists accorded Cromwell the raffish trade of brewer and dubbed him Nol – a diminutive of Oliver. They revelled in the fact that Cromwell’s great-grandfather had been a brewer who ran a pub in Putney. Following Pride’s Purge, a royalist news sheet lampooned the Rump Parliament as ‘Nol’s Brew-house’, satirising it as a group of brewers under Cromwell’s leadership: ‘The devil’s in the beer-brewers (I think).’ Among the central characters only Colonel Pride had been a brewer, but the beery imagery allowed Cromwell’s enemies to savage his abilities, his probity and his social qualifications for leadership, all at once.
People with a ready wit were much in demand on both sides during and after the wars. Writers even turned to verse and drama. In 1647, Craftie Cromwell appeared, asking sarcastically if posterity would forget ‘Nol and his levelling crew’:
Shall not his nose dominicall
In verse be celebrated;
Shall famous Harry Marten fall*
And not be nominated?
Mercurius Melancholicus, by John Taylor, known as the Water Poet, concluded that the parliamentarians would surely not be forgotten but remembered for their treachery:
And if my muse give aid
This shall be their memorial
The rogues their king betrayd.18
All this knockabout fun stopped with the death of the king. Days later, followers of the Prince of Wales proclaimed him King Charles II. Within weeks, Charles issued a bloodthirsty battle-cry against those who had sat in judgment of his father: ‘We are firmly resolved, by the assistance of almighty God, to be severe avengers of the innocent blood of our dear father … to chase, pursue, kill and destroy as traitors and rebels, and chiefly those bloody traitors who had any hand in our dear father’s murder.’19
The difference in tone from Eikon Basilike could not have been greater. As Jason Peacey has said of Charles’s pronouncement, ‘Such language of revenge … seems directly responsible for the reign of terror instigated by exiled royalists upon representatives of the Rump posted to Europe during 1649–50.’20 In truth, for the bloodshed that followed, there were two agents: one inanimate in the form of Eikon Basilike, and the other the extremely animated form of Charles II, who would prove true to his word many years later. In the meantime, his bloody rallying call and his father’s posthumous influence together provided a mixture as inflammable as air and petrol.
In the weeks and months following the king’s execution, English communities in northern European cities became hot with outrage and revenge fever. In Hamburg, feeling ran so high that even those who had seen
Charles as a despot were deeply affected. A parliamentary spy reported: ‘The king’s death is strangely taken here by all sorts of people; we can scarce walk in the streets. Tis scarce credible how bitterly the vulgar and better sorts of people do resent it, though few of them hold him less than a tyrant.’21
The man who sent this report, Henry Parker, was secretary to the English Merchant Adventurers in Hamburg. He had been a successful propagandist for the parliamentary side during the Civil Wars and was one of the editors of The King’s Cabinet Revealed, the selection of Charles’s letters sensationally published after they were captured at the Battle of Naseby.
Parker had arrived in Hamburg at about the same time as a significant royalist agent. Sir John Cochrane was Parker’s complete opposite in nature and deed. Whereas the latter was an urbane lawyer with a noted writing style, Cochrane was a Scottish professional soldier whose persuasive technique was that of the thug. He lost no time in setting out to intimidate the English merchants in the hope of turning their support – and ships – away from the revolutionary cause. He showed little sensitivity in selecting his targets and even attempted to have the chaplain to the English congregation shot. Parker described the event in an intelligence briefing:
The rage is such here against the English that the servants of Col. Cochrane laid wait for the English minister, when he was going to the English house to preach, and would have pistolled him; (but) the pistolls not taking fire, the fellows being made with anger drew their Poyniards to stab the minister, who crying out murther, was rescued by the citizens.
Charles was desperate for both men and money and instructed his continental agents to raise cash by whatever means. One scheme involving Cochrane entailed raising money by kidnapping English merchants and holding them to ransom. At the town of Pinneberg, eighteen kilometres from Hamburg, the kidnappers succeeded in luring three merchants on board a ship with the intention of taking them off and demanding £30,000 for their safe return. After seizing their victims, the kidnappers did not act quickly enough and the merchants raised a troop of two hundred musketeers in a successful rescue bid.22
By April, Henry Parker had been recalled home, having been an agent in Hamburg since 1646. His replacement was Richard Bradshaw, a relative of John Bradshaw, who had presided over the court that tried the king and was now president of the ruling Council of State. In early May, a plot to kill the younger Bradshaw was uncovered before any harm was done. For fear of being assassinated in the streets, Bradshaw became a virtual prisoner in his home. He complained that the city fathers did little to deal with those hell-bent on doing away with him. Despite his fears, he survived.
In The Hague, tensions were even higher due to the presence of Charles himself. Royalist exiles ranged from hot-headed young Cavaliers, who maintained their allegiance to Charles undimmed, to former royal advisors and civil servants such as Edward Hyde and Sir Edward Nicholas. The cult of Charles I as the martyred king was well established on the Continent. By now, editions of Eikon Basilike were circulating in English, Latin, Dutch and German. In a sermon preached before Charles II, Dr Richard Watson spoke of ‘the everlasting stupendous monument of a book raised higher than the pyramids of Egypt in the strength of language and well proportioned expression’.
When word reached the city in early 1649 that Sir Isaac Dorislaus, the Dutch lawyer who had played such a central role in drawing up the charges against the king, was being sent as a parliamentary emissary, the blood in many a young royalist’s veins reached boiling point. One man in the city could provide direction for all this boiling blood. The Marquis of Montrose, a Scottish aristocrat and general who had fought bravely for Charles I in Scotland against the Covenanters,* was an exile like the rest – but he was an exile who would never give up. When he heard the news of the king’s death, he is said to have fainted. On recovering, ‘he vowed to devote himself exclusively to revenge the murder of his beloved master; and, to give solemnity to his vow, and at the same time expression to his grief, he retired to a private chamber, where he spent two days, without permitting a living being to see or speak to him.’23 Montrose then wrote to Charles’s widow that he would revenge the king, whose epitaph he would write ‘with blood and wounds’.24 If any man would know how to choose a target and organise a band of men to attack it, it was Montrose.
The men he selected for the job were no run-of-the-mill heavies who could be hired for a few shillings to do any rough deed. Montrose hand-picked members of the Scottish establishment who had followed him into exile. Sir John Spottiswood had been a gentleman of the bedchamber to James I and was the son of the former Archbishop of St Andrews and Primate of Scotland. Colonel Walter Whitford was the son of the Bishop of Brechin who had backed the reforms instigated by Archbishop Laud. The others were all former Cavaliers.
Dorislaus arrived in his native city in April. Together with Walter Strickland, the long-serving parliamentary ambassador to the Dutch United Provinces, he was to open negotiations for an alliance with London. The Hague was neither safe nor welcoming. It harboured large numbers of well-armed English and Scottish royalists who held a serious grudge against the Dutch academic. The Commonwealth government should have known better than to send him. Dorislaus should have known better than to go.
On 29 April he set up lodgings at an inn called the Witte Zwaan (White Swan). Rumours reached Strickland that a gang of assassins was planning to kill the middle-aged scholar. They had been boasting about it around the town. Strickland sent a note to Dorislaus, advising him to move to a private house where he could be better protected.25 Dorislaus stubbornly stayed put at the inn, though he did postpone a journey across the town to visit Strickland. The following day, 1 May, an attempt was made on his life, but he escaped.
The day after, doing his best to protect his naive colleague, Strickland made the journey across town to visit Dorislaus at his lodgings. That evening, he left Dorislaus about to eat his supper and went home for his own. An hour later, a group of between six and twelve armed men entered the inn. Thanks to effective groundwork, they knew the location of Dorislaus’s rooms. As they ran along the corridor with swords and pistols drawn, servants called out ‘Murder’. Hearing the shouts, the servants attending Dorislaus rushed to the door and put their weight against it. The doctor looked for another way out, but finding none, decided he should accept his fate. According to his servants, ‘he returned to his chair, and folding his arms, leant upon it, with his face towards the door’.26
The assassins pushed their way in to find Dorislaus sitting composed and looking them in the eye. His unarmed servants were pushed back and had pistols and swords held to their chests. Walter Whitford ran forwards and slashed Dorislaus across the head with his sword before running him through his body. The rest of the gang then thrust their swords into the dying man’s body.27 As they ran off, they shouted, ‘Thus dies one of the king’s judges.’
It was a miserable end to the life of a scholar, lawyer and diplomat; one who had been educated at Leiden University, was an expert on ancient Roman history, and had held the first professorship in ancient history at the University of Cambridge. It was a shoddy beginning to Charles’s vow of vengeance upon those who had killed his father. There is, of course, no denying that Dorislaus was foolhardy to take up the post in The Hague. As one Venetian diplomat summed it up, ‘he had the audacity to betake himself to Holland where the king’s son was.’28 Strickland, though fearing he was the assassins’ next target, arranged for his colleague’s body to be transported to England, where he was buried in Westminster Abbey after a state funeral.29 His son and daughters were awarded pensions.
Following the assassination, Whitford escaped across the border into the Spanish-held Netherlands with the help of the Portuguese ambassador, who was in on the plot. He lived on to receive not one but two royal pensions. Spottiswood was less lucky: he was executed following the doomed campaign in Scotland led by Montrose for Charles II the following year. Montrose, left high and dry by Charles, was ex
ecuted by hanging and quartering. Parts of his body were exhibited on buildings around Scotland.
Charles was already showing the perplexing mix of characteristics that would become more apparent in future years. His wish to further his cause was undermined by his constant desire to retreat into personal pleasure. This flaw was not without its reasons. He had been forced into a humiliating flight from his country to an uncertain future abroad. As a youth he had suffered the indignity of having no autonomy at his mother’s cash-strapped court in Paris. Not only did Henrietta need money herself, she refused to give the prince any allowance of his own, thereby reducing him to the status of a dependant. There was worse: he began to hear most unflattering things about his father, very much at odds with the image portrayed in the Eikon. Charles, he gathered, had through stubbornness and lack of statecraft been the author of his own misfortunes. Whatever else he did, the prince knew he had to break out and somehow become his own man. In tattered shoes and with no regular income, it was a tall order.
In England, the constant fear of royalist plots led the Council of State to appoint a head of espionage. Thomas Scot’s job was to manage the gathering of intelligence both at home and abroad. He took up his post on 1 July. Scot was a stridently independent supporter of the Commonwealth and a hater of all things Presbyterian. Not much is known for certain about his early years; he was said to have been educated at Westminster School and Cambridge, but there is record of neither. He was said to have practised as an attorney but his name does not appear on the rolls of any of the Inns of Court.30 With his shadowy past, he was perfect material for a double agent, never mind a spymaster. He set about creating a network of spies that would come into its own in the 1650s.
