King Charles II

by Fraser, Antonia

  Charles’ first choice had in fact not been Breda but the welcoming island of Jersey. There Henrietta Maria could join him. Their ultimate objective was Ireland, which could be more easily reached from Jersey. But Henrietta Maria’s finances did not even permit her to get as far as Jersey. With her son, she could expect but little from the French Court at that time. It was true that the Peace of Westphalia in October had brought an official end to the Thirty Years’ War, which had plagued the people and beggared the state exchequers (although France continued to fight Spain for another eleven years). In theory, European rulers were now free to get on with their interior business of government. But the granary of this particular peace contained within it the seeds of popular dissidence as well as those of absolutism. In France the first war of the Fronde, which broke out in October and lasted until March the following year, fully occupied Queen Anne and Cardinal Mazarin.

  Breda lay in North Brabant, which was part of the Prince of Orange’s personal patrimony; in addition the Brabantines tended to be Catholics, and would not therefore, like their Dutch neighbours, yearn after the Protestantism of the Parliamentary party. It was not a dull place. Later A Briefe Relation, a Commonwealth gazette, would call it a ‘town smelling with delight, gallantry and wealth’. Its artisans were said to be eminent in ‘the schools of Mars and Venus’.

  Of Charles’ counsellors at Breda not only Hyde, but the Marquess of Ormonde, still concentrated on the prospect of an Irish venture. The presence of Ormonde at the Prince’s side at Breda was in itself reassuring. This splendid man of enormous vitality, head of the Anglo-Norman family of Butler, had been brought up in England under the guardianship of Archbishop Laud, but his vast estates were Irish: as he neatly put it, summing up the enduring Anglo-Irish situation, he himself was Irish ‘by fortune though not by birth’. His blonde good looks called forth the admiration of Cromwell himself who, gazing at his portrait, observed approvingly that he looked more like a huntsman than a soldier. Ormonde was twenty years older than Charles (and would outlive him) and had a passion for hard work, coupled with a romantic admiration for King Charles I, which made him a wonderfully energetic and loyal servant. Indeed, Ormonde is one of the few consistently admirable and sympathetic soldiers-cum-statesmen throughout the Civil War period, Commonwealth, Protectorate and reign of Charles II. This in itself is a remarkable achievement, since many behaved admirably in some of these periods, but generally those who behaved admirably throughout did not also behave sympathetically.

  For the time being, therefore, with the experienced Hyde and the stable Ormonde to head them, the pro-Irish party of Charles’ advisers were in the ascendant.

  As for Charles at Breda, he experienced for the first time the unpleasant fate of being a provider who could not provide, an experience which became disastrously familiar to him during the years of exile. Much was traditionally expected of a royal prince in the way of benevolence and charity – whatever his fortunes. Desperately, his suffering followers (who had of course suffered in the royal cause) assumed that their prince or monarch could still exercise his ancient role as a fatherly protector, at any rate in the financial sense. Increasingly, as far as Charles was concerned, that could not be. In December the Prince could not even borrow £200 from a banker at The Hague called Monsieur L’Empereur; he finally scrounged the money out of another banker called Boyet. In the meantime the demands of his pathetic co-Royalists – the ‘Crowd of Fugitives who hung upon them [the Court] for bread’ – swelled.4 At Breda, where Charles existed with a greatly diminished household, these demands could only be met by the small subscriptions still forthcoming for the cause from the loyal Cavaliers.

  At Breda in December there was stringency, a certain amount of hope, a great deal of waiting. Elsewhere the pace was moving faster and ever faster.

  In December the Prince of Wales received at last renewed overtures from the Scots. The Committee of the Estates and the Kirk had at last agreed. The Committee’s letter referred to Charles tactfully – or perhaps menacingly would be the right description – as their ‘native Prince’; as such, he should urge his father to take the Oath of the Covenant, which had always been the price demanded by the Scots for their approval and assistance. There was certainly a note of menace in the Kirk’s reference to Charles’ own way of life, his need for ‘prayer and understanding’. Both Committee and Kirk agreed that in this vital ‘prayer and understanding’ lay the true key to the King’s recovery of his own throne. The Prince returned a negative answer.

  Even if he had so wished, there was not much that Charles could have done at this point. During this same period, events were galloping to a crisis in England. Charles could not reach his father. He did not even know where his father was now held. That left ‘prayer and understanding’. No doubt Charles did pray, if not according to the Scots’ model. But his prayers did not prevent his father being removed from Carisbrooke on 1 December by the Army. The King was confined first of all at Hurst Castle, a grim and isolated fortress on the Hampshire bank of the Solent, near Lymington – he observed that he was leaving the best castle in England for the worst. A few days later, following Pride’s Purge of the House of Commons, the Army officially seized power. On 17 December the King was taken at their orders to Windsor Castle.

  About this time Charles at Breda was receiving his father’s letters written from Carisbrooke at the end of the previous month. The sentiments expressed therein were admirable, although the Army leaders, becoming rapidly convinced that there would be no peace for the weary English people while the King could continue to stir the pot, might have viewed them with cynicism.

  ‘Son,’ began the King, ‘by what hath been said, you may see how long we have laboured in search of peace. Do not you be discouraged to tread those ways, to restore yourself to your right; but prefer the way of peace….’ This particular letter was long and full of sage advice, couched in beautifully rounded phrases, the King being as ever a master of the graceful admonition. Its final words were prophetic. It is likely that they remained in the memory of the young Prince until the time came to implement them: ‘The English people are a sober people,’ wrote the King, ‘however at present under some infatuation. We know not but this may be the last time we may speak to you or the world publicly…. To conclude, if God give you success, use it humbly and far from revenge. If He restore you upon hard conditions, whatever you promise, keep.’5

  Charles returned to the Court at The Hague for Christmas, and it was a paradox that life there during that brief but festive season was extremely gay. In England Christmas had been visited with grim official disapproval, and banished from the calendar, as being Popish and undesirable. The House of Commons continued to sit. Shops were forbidden to close. It was supposed to be a day like any other. But at The Hague Charles flirted with his cousins, the numerous Palatine princesses, and admired in particular the vivacity of little Sophia.

  It was not until 13 January that Charles was informed that the trial of his father was going ahead. The news was horrific enough – the trial of a reigning monarch by his subjects administered a shock wave throughout Europe in itself. But at this point Charles did not seriously envisage his father’s life being in danger. Deposition, a lifetime’s incarceration: these were the possibilities, frightful enough in themselves. Charles wrote immediately to General Sir Thomas Fairfax – widely and correctly rumoured to be far less intransigent on the subject of the King than his colleague Oliver Cromwell – and the Council of War.6 He pointed out in the most urgent terms that he had no sources of information about the health and general condition of his father other than the ‘common gazettes’ – the newspapers which trickled across the Channel and into the Low Countries, often weeks late. The Army had not allowed his father at Windsor to receive the Prince’s own emissary, who had been sent with the specific task of reporting on the King’s state.

  Now there had come to Charles’ ears a rumour ‘the mere thought of which seems so horrible and incredible’ th
at it moved him to address the Council of War directly. He begged them to testify to their fidelity by reinstating their lawful King, and restoring peace to the kingdom. It should be appreciated that to Charles his correspondents were no more than a collection of enigmatic strangers, who had mysteriously seized power in his own country. He had never met Cromwell or the other insurgent leaders. Charles’ complete ignorance of the make-up of the new men at the helm in England, although hardly his own fault, was to be a great disadvantage to him subsequently when trying to cope from abroad with the phenomenon of the Commonwealth. On this occasion he made a pathetic attempt to woo these new men with flattery: the restoration of peace, he wrote, would be ‘an honour never before given to so small a number as you’.

  The letter was of course perfectly useless, not to say irrelevant, in an England now totally dominated by the revolutionary junta. The Army leaders had ears, but they did not wish to hear. Their growing suspicions of each other added to their determination not even to be seen to hearken to outside pleadings. A letter written by Henrietta Maria during the previous autumn, asking to be allowed to be near her husband ‘in the uttermost extremity’, was not even opened – it lay sealed for thirty-three years.7

  In his despair, Charles also tackled his theoretical friend and ally, France, once more. On 18 January he wrote to his cousin the King, and to Mazarin, begging them to remonstrate with these English plenipotentiaries. But there was little comfort to be derived from France: on 6 January the eight-year-old Louis and his brother Philippe d’Orléans, sleepy and ill-prepared, had been bundled away from Paris, where their palace was surrounded by the howling and contumacious Frondeur mob, to Saint-Germain. Their new abode was icy cold and ill-furnished: the nightmare trip was later blamed for Louis XIV’s lifelong dislike of Paris. Peace was not made for three months – three crucial months, in which all influence of the French royal family was in abeyance, from the point of view of the English royal family. Letters of remonstrance, received too late to weigh very heavily, were the best Charles could get out of them.

  On 20 January 1649 the trial of King Charles I opened in Westminster Hall – the sombre scene of Strafford’s ordeal eight years earlier. Two days later the Prince of Wales seems to have realized for the first time that his father’s life was actually in danger. His slowness to grasp the exact nature of the King’s predicament is explained not only by difficulties of communication but also by the nature of the age in which he lived. Monarchs were put to death, it was true, but such events had been appalling rarities in European history. Although the King’s own grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots, had been executed, so earth-shaking was the event felt to be that parallels were sought back in the Middle Ages to gloss it over with the patina of historical precedent; moreover, the deed had not been carried out by her own subjects, but by their neighbours.

  On 23 January one of the Prince’s attendants, Boswell, pleaded in French on the King’s behalf in front of the States-General. Charles’ own French was still considered too limping to carry out such a crucial task. He was horrified to have to tell them, began Boswell, that an English Prince came before them, seeking intercession for the life of the King his father. As a result of this personal appeal, two Dutch envoys, Albert Joachimi and Pauw Adriaen, set off for England, led by an emissary from the Prince in the shape of Sir Henry Seymour. It was the intention of the Dutch to ask for the trial to be delayed, at least, in favour of some kind of arbitration.

  The mission was useless. By the time the Dutch reached England the King had already been condemned to death. Some of the most determined judges had already signed the death warrant by the Friday, 26 January – although certain names were not to be found amongst their number, including that of Fairfax. Representative of that (large) section of the English people who could not follow the revolutionaries down their messianic path any further, Fairfax had not even attended the trial. When his whereabouts were questioned, a masked woman called out from the public gallery that he had too much wit to be present. It later transpired that it was his wife. The same masked unknown, made fearless by her confidence in her own rectitude, had something to say when the charge against the King was proposed to be in the name of ‘the Commons and Parliament assembled and all the good people of England’. She cried out once more, ‘It’s a lie, not half nor a quarter of the people!’8

  On the Saturday, 27 January, the King was brought back into the court to hear the sentence of death read out.

  The next day, at St James’s Palace, to which he had been brought from Windsor and where he would spend the last days of his life, the King was allowed to receive Sir Henry Seymour, the Prince’s messenger. The mission was accomplished through the good offices of the King’s guard, Colonel Tomlinson – who was after the Restoration rewarded for this chink of humanity in the hitherto unbreachable Army wall by being let off trial for his life. Seymour was thus able to receive last messages for Charles, and the King’s final letter to his wife.

  On the next day, the last day of his life, the King was permitted to see those two touching little figures, Princess Elizabeth and Henry Duke of Gloucester, who had remained as captives in London since the collapse of their father’s regime. It was fifteen months since they had set eyes on the King. Princess Elizabeth had grown into a delicate but intelligent girl of thirteen: the tears rained down her face as she clasped her father. That set her brother off crying too. It was a scene which wrung all who witnessed it, including the King’s custodians.

  Later that night the Princess wrote down the contents of the interview in full, the first and most affecting of all the many documents which form the martyrology of King Charles I.9 The King spoke to the girl of her mother: she should tell Queen Henrietta Maria ‘that his thoughts had never strayed from her, and that his love should be the same to the last’.

  But even in such a poignant moment the King did not forget the future of the royal house he had tried in vain to serve, and had only succeeded in ruining. The interests of the true succession must remain paramount. There must be no young puppet kings in the hands of Parliament, agreeing to conditions which older and wiser heads would have rejected. Elizabeth was to tell James Duke of York that in future Charles was to be to him not only his elder brother but also his king. To the eight-year-old Harry, the King was even more explicit. Taking the boy onto his knee, he told him, ‘Sweetheart, now they will cut off thy father’s head.’

  Then, as Harry continued to gaze steadily at his father, the King patiently explained the most important worldly message of all: ‘Mark what I say, you must not be a king as long as your brothers Charles and James do live. For they will cut off your brothers’ heads when they can catch them, and cut off thy head too at the last. And therefore I charge you, do not be made a king by them.’

  The little boy sighed deeply and to his father’s gratified surprise said very firmly, ‘I will be torn in pieces first.’ The King ended on a note of a martyr’s holy pride: ‘And that he doubted not but that the Lord would settle his throne upon his son … and that we should all be happier than we could have been if he had lived.’

  That son was in the meantime in a state of turmoil and despair. The only step he was not prepared to take on behalf of his father is the one sometimes ascribed to him in popular mythology – the presentation of a blank sheet of paper to the generals, bearing his signature, for them to name their own terms to save his father’s life.10 It had been dinned into Charles by the King that nothing was worth the sacrifice of the Church of England, whose preservation was bound up with that of the monarchy itself. If the generals had demanded a series of religious concessions, Charles knew well his father would not have wished to live on those terms.fn1

  Charles thrashed about him, looking for foreign aid. Letters were sent on behalf of Louis XIV to both Oliver Cromwell and to Fairfax, whose withdrawal from the proceedings had given rise to false hopes that he might head some northern or even Scottish-based rescue attempt. But it was symptomatic of the tense, icy, su
spicious – and determined – atmosphere which prevailed among the remaining Army leaders in London, that the generals did not even dare open these letters, and those of the States-General, except in the presence of three hundred officers. In the same way the Dutch emissaries were heard on Monday, 29 January, in complete silence. Afterwards no comment was given. None was necessary. In England the Gadarene hours were rushing by towards the execution of the King.

  Tuesday, 30 January, was the appointed day. Then, at the very last minute, there was a hitch. Curiously enough, it was the existence of Charles Prince of Wales which held up the proceedings and brought about that very delay which foreign supplication could not achieve.

  It was suddenly realized that the execution of King Charles I was not enough. That would simply leave the junta and England itself with the spectre (or vision) of King Charles II. It would be a powerful case of ‘The King is dead, long live the King’. For although the House of Lords had been abolished in early January, leaving the House of Commons with the self-appointed power to pass new statutes without the agreement of either Lords or King, no one had yet got round to the task of abolishing the monarchy itself. They had all been too much involved in the process of cutting off the King’s head with the crown on it, in the jovial, blackguardly phrase ascribed to Oliver Cromwell. There was no time before the execution to pass through such a radical measure – in fact, the monarchy was not officially abolished until six weeks later – but something had to be done about the succession. Otherwise they might cut off the King’s head to their heart’s content, but the crown would merely be transferred by the devout monarchists to another head of the Royal Hydra, the head of the Prince of Wales.

  In the course of that freezing January morning an urgent measure was passed ‘that no person whatsoever should presume to declare Charles Stewart (son of the late Charles) commonly called the Prince of Wales, or any other person, to be King, or chief magistrate, of England and Ireland….’ Only then was it time for the King, wearing two shirts against the cold so that he should not shiver and be mistaken for a coward, to step out of a window in the Palace of Whitehall towards the ready scaffold.