77 CSPD, 1645–47, p. 57.
78 Gardiner, Civil War, ii, 283–5.
79 For Fleming see Adamson, Noble Revolt, pp. 481, 495–7, 707; ‘Memorials preserved at Bruges of King Charles the Second’s residence in that City’, Archaeologia, vol. xxxv, 338; Napier, Memorials of Montrose, ii, 119–21, 123.
80 For Callendar, see Keith M. Brown, ‘Courtiers and Cavaliers: Service, Anglicisation and loyalty among the royalist nobility’, in John Morrill (ed.), The Scottish National Covenant in its British Context (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), pp. 176–7; David Stevenson, ‘Livingstone, James, first earl of Callendar (d. 1674)’, ODNB, 2004, accessed 17 March 2010.
81 HMC, 8th Report, Appendix 1, p. 212 9b0; HMC, Portland MSS, 1, pp. 362–3; LJ, vii, 513; Gardiner, Civil War, ii, 285–6.
82 Baillie, Letters and Journals, ii, 322.
83 Bruce, Charles I in 1646, pp. 12–13, 31–6, 47; David Smith, Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement, c. 1640–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 125–7, 148–9; Stevenson, Revolution and Counter-Revolution, pp. 47–55.
84 Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage in the Reign of Charles II, p. 169.
85 Clarendon, Rebellion, viii, 10; Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage in the Reign of Charles II, pp. 168–9; Colonel Joseph Bampfield’s Apology, Written by Himself and Printed at his Desire, 1685, ed. John Loftis and Paul H. Hardacre (London: Associated University Presses, 1993), pp. 18–19.
86 See ibid.
87 Ibid., pp. 38–45, 97–107; CSPD, 1644–45, p. 251; ODNB (Bampfield).
88 CCC, ii, 608; Bampfield’s Apology, pp. 45–6.
89 Ibid., p. 46.
90 Ibid., pp. 107–9; Bruce, Charles I in 1646, pp. 31–6, 47, 51; Wedgwood, King’s War, pp. 533–4, 542–6. For the career of the Countess of Carlisle, see Lita-Rose Betcherman, Court Lady and Country Wife (London: John Wiley, 2005).
91 Bruce, Charles I in 1646, pp. 31–9, 47.
92 Ibid., p. 31.
93 CClSP, i, 303; ibid., ii, 28.
94 Victor Stater, ‘Grenville, John, first earl of Bath (1628–1701)’, ODNB, September 2004, online edn, January 2008, accessed 17 March 2010. See also below, esp. Chapters 8–10.
95 Bruce, Charles I in 1646, pp. 32–6; Wedgwood, King’s War, pp. 554–7, 564.
Chapter 4
Blasted Hopes 1646–1649
If Oudart and Bosevile had not escaped beyond seas (the one into Holland, the other France) they would hardly have escaped hanging here; Oudart having delivered letters to the D. of York, persuading him to attempt an escape, and Bosevile having received his answer, which was intercepted at Carisbrooke Castle, with several other letters from the Queen and others.
Anonymous letter, probably from Francis Cresset, to William Hamilton,
Earl of Lanark, 23 February 1648
For several weeks after the surrender of Oxford a few isolated royalist garrisons continued to defy the enemy. Inevitably, one by one, they fell. Worcester, jammed with refugees and with officers who no longer had soldiers to command, was finally surrendered by the governor Colonel Henry Washington on 20 July. The list compiled for the Parliament of those in the garrison included 3 lords, 16 knights, 44 esquires, 9 colonels, 9 lieutenant-colonels, 16 majors, 68 captains, 40 lieutenants, 24 cornets and 40 ensigns. The non-combatants included ‘one bishop, many Doctors [of Divinity], parsons, vicars, curates, ladies not a few’.1 Among the captains was one Nicholas Armorer, until four months earlier the governor of Lord Newport’s fortified house of High Ercall, one of the last royalist strongholds in Shropshire to surrender after enduring three separate sieges. Before the Civil War, Armorer, the younger son of a minor Northumbrian gentry family, had served in Ireland, one of the English volunteers dispatched to suppress the Irish rebellion in 1641 and then sent back to England by Ormond when, in the eyes of the king, his need for men was greater than his lord lieutenant’s.2 In the summer of 1646 Armorer was merely one of hundreds of Cavalier officers who were now forced to make a critical decision: whether to accept that the war was lost, pay their composition fines and withdraw into an inevitably circumscribed private life, or go into exile and attempt to continue the struggle in the service of one or more of the surviving and still intransigent leaders of the Stuart cause.
One week after the fall of Worcester the town and castle of Wallingford, one of the ring of strong points around Oxford, also surrendered. The Governor, Colonel Thomas Blague, had a reputation for ferocity and ruthlessness that even exceeded Washington’s at Worcester. Anthony à Wood, who as a boy had grown up near Oxford during the Civil War, recollected in his memoirs an incident in which a royalist troop was ambushed by a much larger force, but Blague ‘behaved himself as manfully with his Sword as ever man did, slashing and beating so many fresh Rebels with such Courage and Dexterity’ until he succeeded in bringing his men off in an orderly withdrawal. A ‘notable griper’ (oppressor or plunderer), Blague only agreed to surrender Wallingford when his own soldiers, deprived of their pay, mutinied.3 Although he was married, there was no quiet withdrawal into private life for Colonel Blague. Within six weeks of the surrender of Wallingford, Blague was at Newcastle, where Charles had been taken by the Scots, and somehow contrived a private interview with the king where he offered his continued services. Understandably, the dour Presbyterians who now comprised most of the royal entourage did not consider this exceptionally malignant Cavalier suitable company for the monarch, whose manifold errors they were trying to eradicate in a relentless series of undeniably godly but tedious and tactless sermons and lectures. Blague was quickly expelled from the city, but not before he was given letters by Charles to take to the queen in Paris. Recognising that Blague had served him ‘with courage and fidelity’, the king instructed that he be made a groom of the bedchamber to the Prince of Wales.4
A tough swordsman like Thomas Blague was not in normal times likely to be given a position in the royal bedchamber, but the times were not normal. Cultured connoisseurs of the arts like Endymion Porter were being replaced as bedchambermen by swordsmen and adventurers like O’Neill, Elliot and Blague, who were better suited to deal with the very different demands made on the king’s servants in a new and hostile world that had no time for a cultivated royal court. Those close attendants on the king who did survive from the ‘halcyon days’ of the 1630s, men like Ashburnham and Murray, survived because they were able to adapt to these new conditions; they were still courtiers, but their principal task now was to maintain the links between the widely scattered pieces of a shattered court.
Blague’s employment as a royal courier, travelling from Newcastle to Paris only a few weeks after he had reluctantly surrendered the stronghold of Wallingford that he had defended so grimly for so long, was an early example of a trend soon to be followed by Nicholas Armorer and by many other now unemployed Cavaliers. To make the transition from soldier to courier, spy, conspirator or intelligence agent was one of the best ways to demonstrate a continuing active allegiance to the Stuart cause. This was not a decision and a transition made only by soldiers – by Blague in 1646, for example, and then later by Armorer. It was to be made by non-military royalists as well. The flight of the king and the surrender of Oxford meant the demobilisation of the garrison, the disintegration of the court, a purge of church pulpits and university fellowships, and the closing down of the various departments of the royal administration and bureaucracy, ranging from the mint to the printing presses. Unemployed and bewildered courtiers, royal officials, clergymen, academics, journalists, in many cases accompanied by their families, scattered from a city now garrisoned by Fairfax’s redcoats, its pulpits and university colleges gradually being taken over by preachers and fellows approved of by Parliament. Richard Harwood, preaching in St Mary’s a month after Naseby, reflected that his congregation were now prisoners in their own country: ‘England itself, the Paradise of the world, is now become our Babylon.’ To the victims of this new Babylonian Captivity, Har
wood counselled a patient withdrawal into ‘the chamber of devotion’ to await salvation in the Lord’s own good time.5
Although driven from their customary employments and careers, not all royalists were prepared to accept military defeat as final and to follow Harwood’s advice to withdraw into a life of quiet retirement and pious or nostalgic reflection. Instead, some turned to underground or clandestine opposition to the victorious Parliament; but for some it was an opposition whose weapon was to be the pen rather than the sword. A refugee from Oxford in Blague’s Wallingford garrison when it surrendered was John Berkenhead, one-time brilliant editor of Mercurius Aulicus. For the five weeks following the battle of Naseby Aulicus failed to appear at all, then two more issues were published in the second half of August, but no more. But Berkenhead’s career as a royal propagandist was not yet over. After the surrender of Wallingford he eventually made his way to London, where new opportunities were opening for journalists, with the establishment of underground presses to meet an increasingly strong popular demand for royalist newsbooks and pamphlets.6
The political prospect at the approach of what Earl Miner has called ‘the Cavalier winter’ was certainly bleak and threatening, although with some faint rays of sunshine flickering here and there.7 It was also a prospect rich in complex situations and rapidly changing conditions that placed difficult and sometimes unfamiliar demands on royalist agents. One development of enormous consequence was that there was no longer one fixed, final and established royal authority to which royalists could turn. Charles was a king without a court or a government, hastily taken north by the Scots to Newcastle after his surprise appearance outside their camp before Newark. Genuinely loyal attendants, like Ashburnham, were few in number, regarded with suspicion and barely tolerated. In order to escape arrest Ashburnham claimed that he ‘hastened into France to give the Queen an Account of what had happened in that unhappy expedition to the Scots’.8 But if Charles were to retain any influence on shaping royalist policy he had to be able to communicate with a scattered, diverse and in some cases mutually suspicious collection of actual or possible supporters. Henrietta Maria remained in Paris, maintaining on a pension from the French crown a modest household, in which the ex-army plotters Jermyn and Percy were prominent. She usually resided either in the Louvre or in the palace of St. Germain outside the capital. Another centre of royalist authority was the Prince of Wales, who with his flight from England in the spring of 1646 began the restless travels that were to continue for the next fifteen years. Between April 1646, when he arrived at Jersey from the Scilly islands, and January 1649, when his father was executed, Prince Charles and his household or ‘family’ were frequently on the move between Jersey, Paris, Breda and The Hague, creating constant problems for royal couriers trying to keep the different members of the royalist leadership in contact with each other. During the second half of 1646 many of these royalist leaders – Prince Rupert, Montrose, Nicholas, Digby, Goring and many others – made the melancholy journey into exile to settle in a variety of different towns in France, the Low Countries and Germany, bringing with them their feuds and animosities, their bitterness and frustrations, but all in different ways determined to continue the struggle.9 The defeat of the king’s armies in the Civil War had solved nothing; a negotiated peace settlement seemed as far off as ever, as the scattered royalist leaders planned how to reverse the results of Naseby and Philiphaugh.
For approximately seven months Charles remained in Newcastle in the hands of the Scots, until in February 1647, with no agreement having been reached, he was handed over to Parliament’s commissioners, who brought the king southwards and installed him in the vast Elizabethan prodigy mansion of Holmby (or Holdenby) House in Northamptonshire. Derided from many quarters for its handing over of the king, the Scots army withdrew back across the border. The extensive range and varied nature of the activities of royalist agents during this period of post-war disillusionment and frustration illustrate important elements in a complex pattern of shifting alliances and changing fortunes as several different interests manoeuvred and intrigued with or against each other, each one attempting to establish a settlement that would satisfy its own particular demands and aspirations.
A major challenge for the king’s agents was how to enable him to communicate with committed or potential supporters: with the queen and her advisers in Paris; with the Prince of Wales and his council wherever they happened to be; with Ormond in Ireland; with Montrose, or as the political power balance began to change in Scotland, with other Scottish notables, notably the still-powerful Argyll, or emerging from imprisonment to partial reinstatement in royal favour, the potentially powerful Duke of Hamilton. The letters that passed between the king and these various figures refer to the employment of a number of agents, among whom at this time Will Murray was particularly prominent. As well as being well known to both the king and queen, he also had valuable contacts with the Scots Presbyterian leadership. Murray is an enigmatic figure who somehow contrived to retain relationships with an extraordinarily diverse collection of figures: Charles and Henrietta Maria; courtiers, like Ashburnham and Jermyn; leaders of the Scottish Kirk party, for example the two Presbyterian ministers Robert Baillie and Alexander Henderson; the two bitterly opposed rivals for power in Scotland, Argyll and Montrose, and Hamilton and his younger brother, the Earl of Lanark.10 When the complex juggling required to keep all these relationships in play is considered, it is not surprising that Murray has left behind a shadowy and somewhat dubious reputation as a specialist in backstairs intrigues.11
Charles had welcomed the queen’s news in January 1646 that she was sending Murray over to him from Paris, and even considered sending him on to Montrose when he arrived, but Murray was arrested as a spy in Canterbury and imprisoned in the Tower.12 It was not until July, having been released on bail, that he finally reached Charles in Newcastle. By this time he had come to be regarded as a supporter of the Scottish government’s programme, which required the king to sign the Covenant and agree to the abolition of episcopacy. Although inclining too much to Argyll in the king’s opinion, Murray was still personally acceptable; his ‘dexterity’ was appreciated, as was his apparent willingness to explore the possibility of a compromise agreement, what Charles rather extravagantly called ‘my treaty with Will. Murray’.13 Other agents carrying letters between the king and the queen were also in favour of reaching an agreement between Cavaliers and Covenanters, and in at least one case received a much less sympathetic hearing than had Murray. When the ex-army plotter and courtier Sir William Davenant, believing that he was honestly presenting the views of the queen and her advisers, recommended the making of concessions on the issue of church government, the king, according to Clarendon, ‘was transported with so much passion and indignation, that he gave him more reproachful terms, and a sharper reprehension, than he ever did to any other man, and forbade him to presume again to come into his presence’.14 As Davenant would have taken considerable risks and endured some danger and hardship in making the journey from Paris to Newcastle, he would have been entitled to feel that he deserved better treatment.
Shortly before Davenant had his torrid interview with the king, Bampfield also arrived in Newcastle. ‘Colonel Bamfield is newly come from Marquess Hertford,’ Charles wrote to his queen on 26 September. One of the many puzzles about Bampfield is why a fairly obscure West Country Cavalier, a client of the orthodox Anglican royalist magnate Hertford, should so early and so consistently have seen his importance to the Stuart cause as lying in his ability to establish links with Presbyterian leaders. With a Scottish courtier like Will Murray this behaviour is not surprising, but with Bampfield it is. The most likely explanation is that he saw this course as his best avenue to royal favour; it is an illustration of his Realpolitik pragmatic attitude. In any event Bampfield, unlike Blague, Ashburnham, Davenant and other couriers, was not sent across the Channel with letters to the queen, but instead was dispatched to London, apparently with two responsibil
ities. The first was to communicate to the conservative leaders of the ‘negotiated peace at any price’ party, men like Denzil Holles, the Earl of Holland and Lord Willoughby of Parham, the king’s desire that ‘the propositions of the Parliament … might be as moderate as possibly could be procured’.15 The second was to rescue the Duke of York. At this time a boy of 13, the duke had been left behind in Oxford when Charles slipped out of the city to join the Scots, and had become the reluctantly assumed responsibility of the Earl of Northumberland. Writing to the queen on 26 September, Charles informed her that Bampfield had a plan ‘to send the Duke of York to thee’.16
Bampfield and Murray were not the only royalist agents to attempt to maintain communication between the king in Newcastle and his supporters and sympathisers in London. The military victories of the New Model Army had not been welcomed with unalloyed delight by all sections of London’s population. On the contrary, the capital was apprehensive and uneasy, suffering from the economic effects of high and exceptional new taxes and assessments and from the dislocation of trade and commerce caused by four years of war. Groups of disbanded soldiers, known as reformadoes, among who were impoverished and unemployed Cavaliers, were drifting into London, adding further tensions to an already unstable situation.17
For the time being the royalist propaganda distribution network had broken down with the arrest of the bookseller and printer Richard Royston in August 1645, the demise of Mercurius Aulicus, and the capture of the Oxford printing presses. But that faithful intelligencer Dr John Barwick remained at large and still totally committed to the Stuart cause, while Francis Cresset, one of his principal informants, presumably as a result of the influence of his patron, the parliamentarian Earl of Pembroke, was appointed steward and treasurer to the king at Newcastle. Cresset was able to smuggle letters between Charles and Barwick, who, being a staunch upholder of the established church, was kept in the dark about the missions of Murray and Bampfield to Presbyterian leaders taking place at the same time.18
Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies Page 14
