King Charles II

by Fraser, Antonia

  Into this hornets’ nest stepped the Prince of Wales and his Council. In spite of Grenville’s record – and in spite of the fact that he had also recently been wounded – the Council immediately appointed him as commander of the new army of the Western Association.

  It was probably a blunder in the first place, although Grenville did at least show himself a stern disciplinarian towards his own troops, and had the advantage of being a proper Cornishman. But the mistake was rendered fatal when the King immediately wrote off from Oxford nullifying the appointment and setting up Goring instead. Throughout the summer the rival commanders battled for the acknowledgement of their claims.

  The authority of Prince Rupert – the one man in the West who could have imposed some kind of unified command – was unintentionally undermined by the presence of the Prince of Wales and his Council, since many of the western gentry preferred to address themselves to this gentler fount of authority.

  The character of Charles’ puppet master, Sir Edward Hyde, also came into further prominence in the West. Hyde, later Earl of Clarendon, is a central figure in the story of Charles, in youth, early manhood and the first years of his restored kingship. The relationship drew to a close nearly twenty-five years after this western foray. It ended with Clarendon telling a middle-aged monarch ‘twenty times a day’ that he was lazy and not fit to govern.2 It ended with an ageing statesman dismissed by an apparently ungrateful king. There are many comparisons to be made for the dismissal of an old friend and servant by his ascendant master, of which the most famous is that of Falstaff and Prince Hal. All these comparisons are unflattering to the master. It is worth noticing that, in the case of Charles and Hyde, part of the trouble between them existed from the first and was temperamental.

  The temperament concerned was that of Hyde rather than Charles.

  Sir Edward Hyde, with his neat little mouth and sharp straight nose, his upright Anglicanism, his unwavering political principles in a wavering age, was a man for whom the phrase ‘generation gap’ might actually have been invented. A world of experience separated him from his young charge, a fact he never attempted to conceal. He was in his thirties when he went to Bristol, over twenty years older than Charles. In Hyde’s case they had been a long and active twenty years. Hyde was constitutionally incapable of playing the tolerant old retainer, the Colonel Sapp to Charles’ King Rudolf of Ruritania. Besides, Hyde was not an old retainer: he was a brilliant and shrewd statesman; he did not exactly expect to find old heads on young shoulders, but he did expect those young shoulders to bow before the weight of advice given by the old on all occasions.

  Originally a lawyer, in 1640 Hyde was to be found attacking prerogative courts, royal judges and Laudian bishops. He even voted for Strafford’s attainder. Later Hyde became an advocate for a new kind of Royalism, based on an Anglican Church, both liberated and strengthened, and as such was transformed into not only a defender but also a firm friend of King Charles I. Throughout the difficult days of 1642 Hyde had constantly pressed the King to base his claim on those ancient rights which were his under the law; this would have the effect of emphasizing that it was Parliament, not the King, which represented a new type of arbitrary tyranny. Hyde’s reliance on purely constitutional expedients from the first distinguished him from another whole section of the King’s advisers, headed by his wife, who could not see the use of appealing to the law of the land, when they regarded the King himself as embodying this law. Rex est lex – as one saying had it.

  This rift in royal circles widened into a chasm as the war proceeded. Hyde, for example, had been instrumental in persuading the King to summon his Oxford Parliament. But naturally the legal-minded Hyde disapproved of his master’s delicate secret negotiations with his Irish supporters: he foresaw correctly the danger to the King’s reputation if they were uncovered. It was as much to take Hyde’s keen nose off the scent of this correspondence as to safeguard his son that the King despatched his wise counsellor to Bristol.

  Hyde therefore viewed himself as one deputed to supervise – and, where necessary, restrict – the young Prince of Wales. He was a man of extreme gravity of character even in his younger years, the sort of gravity which is quickly taken for pomposity by the young. Charles on the other hand was being encouraged to see himself as having a useful and expanding role to play. Hyde liked to guide by disapproval; Charles liked to learn by encouragement: it was never an ideal combination. From the first Hyde was not sufficiently tolerant, Charles not sufficiently appreciative. By April Charles was said by Hyde (in his later History) to be encouraging disrespect towards his Council at Bridgwater.3 But it was neither necessary nor politic to try and swaddle the Prince for ever.

  Some of Hyde’s disapproval was certainly incurred by another fairly natural piece of youthful folly. In Bridgwater Charles encountered once more his former nurse, Mrs Christabella Wyndham, wife of the governor of the town. On the Continent Queen Henrietta Maria dangled the hand of her eldest son in marriage as a bait to raise money, now that her jewels were in danger of running out. Louise Henrietta, eldest daughter of the Prince of Orange (Mary’s sister-in-law), was offered this fine prospect in return for Dutch money, but her father declined the honour. Earlier there had been plans to marry Charles to the wealthy Infanta Joanna of Portugal, or to the daughter of the Duc d’Orléans, the super-rich Anne-Marie Louise de Montpensier, known to history as La Grande Mademoiselle. But in the West Country Charles was showing more interest in sex than in marriage.

  To Mrs Wyndham, in Bridgwater, should probably be accorded the honour of having seduced her former nurseling, the Prince of Wales. By the sexual standards of the time, to play such a gracious role in the life of a young prince was more of a privilege than an offence, as Madame de Beauvais played it for Louis XIV. Charles was nearly fifteen. Certainly by the time of his arrival in Jersey a year later he was a fully fledged man in the physical sense, capable of a proper love affair. That was not particularly precocious. In an age when princes were frequently married off before they reached their teens, early sexual maturity was desirable rather than the reverse.

  In some ways Mrs Wyndham, ‘a celebrated beauty and an opulent heiress’, was a suitable choice.4 Where Mrs Wyndham did overstep the mark, according to contemporary mores, was by showing gross familiarity to the Prince of Wales in public, including such spontaneous gestures as diving across a room and covering his face with kisses. In doing so, she greatly shocked and annoyed Hyde, who wrote about the whole episode quite lewdly in his History;5 the simple act of seduction accomplished in private, might, one feels, have been discreetly glossed over. Furthermore Mrs Wyndham, in Hyde’s view, distracted Charles from the conduct of his own business.

  Complaints concerning Charles and his work are to be reiterated down the decades and Hyde is very often to be the source of the complaint. In his view Charles had hitherto been ‘very little conversant with business, nor spent his time so well towards the improvement of his mind and understanding as might have been expected from his years and fortune’ – a somewhat sour comment in view of the wartime conditions in which the Prince had been raised. Yet Charles did apply himself, as even Hyde admitted, ‘with great ingenuity’ to the affairs of the Council. Now Mrs Wyndham, besides her public fondlings, was also guilty of playing on Charles’ affections in order to affect Council proceedings. It was her influence, wrote Hyde, that persuaded two members of the Prince’s entourage, Sir Charles Berkeley and Robert Long, to demand to join the Council proper – positions to which they had no right because it was actually the King’s Council (in the West) not the Prince’s.6

  So the petty feuds proliferated.

  Elsewhere in England a revolutionary war machine, the New Model Army, was being assembled by the King’s enemies. Charles in the West devoured local specialities, such as cherry pie and cream, with relish; he also struggled to play some kind of useful political part, for all Hyde’s strictures, in a situation which was rapidly becoming swamped by the rising tide of Royalist
failure. At Bridgwater on 2 June he received a petition from that strange body of protesters known as the Clubmen. The aims of the Clubmen were out of the mainstream of the time: wishing to live in peace in their lands, but sometimes using force to bring about peace, they suffered at the hands of both Royalists and Roundheads. On this occasion they were petitioning against the ‘intolerable rapine’ committed against them by Goring’s horse.

  Charles on his own initiative behaved with both sympathy and wisdom. He wrote a shocked letter to Goring. He also tried to persuade the Clubmen not to take the law into their own hands.

  On 14 June the New Model Army clashed with the King at Naseby, in Northamptonshire: this, their paramount victory, extinguished his military hopes. Not only that, but the King’s secret papers, revealing his ‘treacherous’ Irish dealings, were discovered. For all the successes of Montrose in Scotland, the Royalist cause in England was virtually lost. A month later, to complete the pattern of disaster, Goring, that bird of ill omen, was totally defeated by Fairfax and the New Model Army at Langport not far from Bridgwater.

  The Prince by this time had moved back to Bristol, and then after an outbreak of plague out again to ‘fine sweet’ Barnstaple. But he was clearly no longer as safe as he had formerly been in the West. He wrote an official letter to the Parliamentary general Sir Thomas Fairfax: ‘We have so deep a sense of the present miseries and calamities of this kingdom, that there is nothing that we more earnestly pray to Almighty God than that He would be pleased to restore unto it a happy peace.’7 But at this stage there was very little that anyone on the Royalist side, let alone a fifteen-year-old prince, could do. Once Prince Rupert had surrendered Bristol after a fierce siege, the question was not so much whether the Prince of Wales should be evacuated, but when he should go. Above all, it had to be resolved in which country he should take refuge.

  It was a decision of some moment. And it dominated the Prince’s councils, as well as his correspondence from his father, for the next six months. Should the Prince of Wales be sent to friendly France – where his mother had taken refuge, and was now living at the expense of her relations with his baby sister Henriette-Anne? Or to Scotland? Or to Ireland? Or even to Denmark – where Charles had another relative on the throne?

  More was at stake than Charles’ own safety. France, roughly speaking, represented the foreign Catholic interest, and the influence of Queen Henrietta Maria. Scotland stood for Presbyterianism (and therefore some kind of compromise on behalf of the Anglican King), but also for the British interest, since there it could legitimately be argued that the Prince of Wales was still on British soil. The problem of Ireland was that it was beset by so many different factions at this date, most of them represented by military forces of one size or another, that it was difficult to know whose interests would be served by the arrival there of the Prince of Wales. Perhaps distant Denmark was the best solution.

  At first the King himself took the line that ‘France must be the place, not Scotland nor Denmark’.8 He dreaded making any kind of religious deal with the Scots. At the same time the King was obsessed that the Prince’s mere presence in England might scupper his own dealings with the rebels. If there was any danger of Charles falling into their hands he should proceed immediately to France, where he should place himself under his mother’s orders in absolutely everything – except religion. Should Charles be made prisoner nonetheless, he must on no account agree terms with his captors, even if the King’s own life was threatened.

  But the King’s caveat about religion hardly satisfied the Council, who were frankly horrified at the idea of their Prince passing into any French Catholic hands, including those of his mother. Meanwhile there were public meetings in which the view was forcibly expressed that the Prince of Wales should not leave British soil. Later petitions in Cornwall specifically begged him not to go to France.

  Throughout the autumn the Prince’s entourage was pushed further and further west into Cornwall itself. From there it was decided to make a supreme effort to come to the relief of Exeter. Finally Charles reached Truro, on an extreme point of the peninsula.

  Goring fled to France in November, to cause further trouble there. Grenville remained, to propose a scheme by which ‘poor little Cornwall’, as he termed his native region, should make a separate peace, and set up as a Royalist enclave under the Prince of Wales. The scheme, so agreeable to Grenville’s Cornish susceptibilities, was, however, doomed from the start, since the Council pointed out quickly that such negotiations implied the abdication of King Charles I.

  By December the King changed his mind about the Prince’s refuge: Denmark was now his first choice. Once again the Council objected that the perils of reaching Denmark through winter seas, let alone the difficulty of finding a vessel to make the journey, far outweighed the advantages of that Protestant country as a refuge. Hyde remained strongly of the opinion that Scotland or Ireland (both British soil) were the obvious sites. The King began to bombard his son with letters to the contrary. The situation was further complicated by the fact that Queen Henrietta Maria herself had entered the fray. She was urgently demanding that her son should join her in France, in order to stir Cardinal Mazarin, the effective ruler of the country, to action on the King’s behalf.

  As the campaign in the West reached its last stages the feared General Cromwell, the victor of Naseby, plunged into it, storming Hopton at Torrington in February. The men who flocked to the triumphant Parliamentary banners at Totnes, west of Torquay, were addressed by the great man himself. The Council hastily decided to favour a retreat to the Scilly Isles – just off the Cornish coast. Anything rather than France, was their passionately held policy. Even Jersey, so close to the coast of France but still within the British dominions, was better than a foreign country, where the Prince of Wales would incur the double slur of being a papist and a pensionary. The King himself was becoming increasingly worried by the reckless way in which his spouse in France was prepared to sacrifice the integrity of the Church of England to gain (Presbyterian) Scottish support. He wrote off in anguish to his ‘Dear Heart’: ‘I assure thee, I put little or no difference between setting up the Presbyterian government, or submitting to the Church of Rome.’9

  It was as a last throw that in January 1646 the Prince of Wales formally appointed Lord Hopton as head of the western army, with Grenville under him to command the foot. Grenville immediately and predictably refused to serve in the subordinate position. Hyde described later how Charles did all he could to try and persuade Grenville not to persist in this destructive – and self-destructive – course. But when Grenville remained obdurate, Charles was obliged to have him committed to prison. Grenville’s charismatic but perverse personality was one of the complications of Charles’ Cornish existence.

  On 15 February Hopton fought the final action of the campaign at Torrington; two days later Charles with his Council took refuge at Pendennis Castle, a fastness built by Henry VIII two hundred feet up on the Falmouth peninsula. For a moment the Council wistfully hoped it might be safe to keep him there; but the discovery of a plot to kidnap the Prince of Wales within the castle itself clinched the matter. It was a choice between retreat and capture.

  At ten o’clock at night on Monday 2 March Charles went aboard the frigate Phoenix from Land’s End, accompanied by Sir Edward Hyde, John Colepeper and the Earl of Berkshire. He landed at St Mary’s in the Scilly Isles on the afternoon of 4 March. It was exactly a year since he had left Oxford. Ten days later Hopton signed the articles of surrender at Exeter.

  The move, although master-minded by the Council, accorded with Charles’ own desires. He too shared their reluctance to abandon the scene of action, lest he seem cowardly; but it would have been madness at this point to have ignored his father’s reiterated and fervent pleas not to prejudice the whole position of the monarchy by falling into enemy hands. He did not wish as yet to go to France, despite Henrietta Maria’s frantic requests. The Scilly Isles constituted a pis aller.

 
; But in another sense the journey itself was delightful and the consequences for Charles’ future character radical. For it was during this brief halcyon trip aboard the Phoenix, in the course of which the Prince insisted on taking the helm himself, that Charles discovered that joyous taste for the sea which never deserted him, and was to unite him emotionally to so many of his subjects.

  ‘It is no paradox to say that England hath its root in the sea,’ wrote Halifax.10 Charles discovered his own roots lay there too. The Scillies consisted of tiny islands of which St Mary, the largest, was just over two miles long; they were graced by an exceptionally balmy climate. Everything here centred on the sea. Between the Scillies and Cornwall was said to lie the vanished kingdom of Lyonesse. Over its legendary site now sailed the young Prince in a series of excursions through the spring waters.

  That was the pleasant side of the picture. On the other hand conditions on land were rough, food (mainly brought from France) inadequate, and, since no-one had been expecting the little court to arrive, accommodation lamentable. With her witty and evocative pen, Ann Lady Fanshawe, wife of Charles’ secretary, described how her room was regularly dowsed by the spring tide. There was a shortage of fuel to dry themselves out. In former times her own footman would have been better lodged.11 The court, less optimistic than the young Prince, fretted at the hardships and the inaction.

  In the meantime the Parliamentary privateers, like sharks, began to menace the Prince’s peace. The sea trips were curtailed. It was not long before the argument about where the Prince should now seek refuge began to rage all over again with renewed vigour. Hyde and Colepeper both voted for Jersey, still British soil. The Queen continued to advocate France. When Colepeper visited her to collect money and supplies, she pressed on him a letter full of apprehension about the Scilly Isles’ exposed position. ‘I shall not sleep in quiet until I hear that the Prince of Wales shall be removed from thence.’12 As to the danger of the sea passage to France, she had an assurance from the French Queen that her son’s safety would be guaranteed. And was not the King himself writing to her on every possible occasion concerning the safety of the Prince of Wales?