‘Though I will never fight in any unrighteous quarrel, yet to defend the King, Religion and Laws of a Kingdom against subjects, who are up in arms against their Lord and Sovereign … such a cause my conscience tells me is full of piety and justice: and if it please God to end my days in it, I shall think my last breath spent with as much honour and religion, as if I were taken of my knees at my prayers.’
Prince Rupert His Declaration, 1642
From 1629 until 1640 England experienced what royal opponents termed ‘the Eleven Years’ Tyranny’, when Charles ruled without Parliament. The king managed to obtain funds through various controversial means, including the sale of commercial monopolies, the appropriation of tonnage and poundage customs dues, and by raising the naval war tax of Ship Money during peacetime. These methods helped to foment dissent, at a time when there was no national forum where it could be expressed. The king’s personal rule polarised the political nation.
The tensions that led to civil war became discernible, with increasing vividness and frequency, from the late 1630s onwards. The problems were not new, as an intractable king and an ambitious Parliament clashed with escalating force. Two of James I’s later Parliaments had been short-lived, as traditional monarchy failed to react with tact or understanding to strong social, economic, religious, and philosophical shifts.
Members of Parliament demanded a greater say in government, and a furthering of the Protestant cause at home and in Europe. Charles, though, was unresponsive. He had inherited his father’s belief in the divine right of kings, which held the monarch to be God’s anointed, with a right to rule as he saw fit. He expected his people’s representatives to respect his sovereignty, while granting him revenue when required. Four years into his reign, with three sessions already failed, Charles forewent the demanding politicians dominating Westminster and looked to fund his policies through the resurrection of ancient Crown privileges.
The religious sensibilities of seventeenth-century Europe compounded the discord. The atrocities of the Thirty Years’ War demonstrated that the clash of different Christian sects could lead to carnage. Tales of Catholic brutalities in Germany found a ready audience in Protestant England: ‘At the taking of Magdeburg,’ it was reported in a pamphlet of 1641, ‘a Preacher of great esteem was dragged out of the Church to his own house, that he might see his wife and children ravished, his tender infants snatched from the mother’s breast, and stuck upon the top of a lance, and when his eyes and heart were glutted with so cruel a spectacle, they brought him forth bound into the street, and laid him in the midst of his own books, and setting fire thereto miserably burnt him, and thus have I given you a taste of the lamentations of Germany.’[fn1] The message was clear: the Papists would do the same to their religious foes in England, if they ever got the opportunity — a fear made more real by the threat of rebellion across the Irish Sea. Charles’s marriage to Henrietta Maria, Henry IV of France’s daughter, left him open to the Puritan fear that the queen’s Catholicism would taint the monarch’s soul. When the king failed to launch an armed crusade to restore Rupert’s parents to the Palatine, critics claimed this showed a shameful lack of commitment to Protestantism abroad.
The king’s promotion of the High Churchman William Laud to the Archbishopric of Canterbury was deeply unpopular. Laud’s enemies claimed that: ‘The Archbishop hath been a notable deceiver; for whilst he did always pretend to cast out Popery and faction, he endeavoured nothing more than to bring it in, and settle it among us.’[fn2] Charles’s patronage of such a man seemed to confirm Puritan fears that the corrupt and ungodly, wilfully ignorant of the spiritual needs of the people, were favoured above true believers. This trend left the flock exposed to the wiles of Catholic predators, a theme John Milton angrily explored in his 1637 poem, ‘Lycidas’:
Blind mouthes! that scarce themselves know how to hold
A Sheep-hook, or have learn’d ought els the least
That to the faithfull Herdmans art belongs! …
The hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread:
Besides what the grim Woolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing sed,
But that two-handed engine at the door,
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.
The Puritans believed the king to be dangerously out of kilter with the religious preferences of most of his subjects. This was, they believed, an abrogation of his duty to God. By logical extension, if Charles could not observe his obligations to the Lord, why should they offer unquestioning obedience to their monarch?
*
Charles was king not just of England, but also of Scotland and Ireland. It was his Scottish subjects that brought an end to his personal rule.
Presbyterianism was a radical form of Protestantism that flourished in Scotland, particularly in the Lowlands. In 1637, ignoring his advisers north of the border, Charles insisted on imposing Laud’s English Prayer Book on the Scots. This attempt to achieve spiritual conformity in the two countries caused political as well as religious opposition. When Jenny Geddes, an Edinburgh servant girl, hurled her stool at a priest spouting Laudian offensiveness in St Giles’s Cathedral, her aggression was symbolic of a people’s fury. The Scots resented the highhandedness of a distant ruler who dared to meddle with their souls.
Two Anglo-Scottish conflicts, the Bishops’ Wars, followed. The first, in 1639, was an inconclusive affair that did little more than reveal the feebleness of Charles’s army. The second, a year later, ended in outright humiliation for the king: the Scots defeated the English in battle, and took orderly occupation of Durham and Northumberland. Charles, unable to finance a counterforce, was obliged to summon his first Parliament for more than a decade. Despite the national emergency of having a foreign force on English soil, the Members declined to grant funds unless the king first dealt with wider issues: ‘No taxation without redress of grievances’ was their uncompromising mantra. Their three prime grievances involved the liberty of Parliament, as well as questions of religion and civil government. Charles was not prepared to bargain on any point: ‘the Short Parliament’, so long in the gestation, perished after just three weeks.
The continuing Scottish crisis meant that Parliament had to be reconvened. November 1640 saw the start of what would come to be known as ‘the Long Parliament’. During its first six months it used the foreign incursion to win concessions from the beleaguered king. Charles was forced to approve the Triennial Act, which obliged the Crown to summon Parliament at least once every three years. Members also dismantled the raft of revenue-raising methods that Charles had relied on during his personal rule.
Those favourites most closely associated with the Eleven Years’ Tyranny were now exposed to vengeful fury. Archbishop Laud was imprisoned in the Tower of London. The equally controversial Earl of Strafford, who had ruled Ireland for Charles, suffered a humiliating impeachment. Extreme opponents then insisted on his execution. In a moment of weakness for which he never forgave himself, Charles signed the death warrant of his most loyal servant. Strafford’s dignified acceptance of his fate added to the king’s acute sense of guilt.
Constitutional surgery, combined with the removal of hated advisers, satisfied many in Parliament. However, the radicals, led by the Tavistock MP John Pym, wanted to push further. They sought the abolition of bishops, approval of the appointment of royal ministers, and control of the military. Charles’s supporters were shocked by this broad attack on the royal prerogative, and presented the radicals as self-serving and greedy:
… The game they play for is so great,
Vain is all hope them to intreat.
The Crown is strong: the Church is rich,
At these two things their fingers itch.[fn3]
But the Crown was not strong, and its weakness became ever more obvious. When Irish Catholics rebelled in October 1641, murdering thousands of Protestants, the king prepared to summon, and appoint, the commanders of the avenging English army. However, Parliament insisted on being party to such important matters of state. Meanwhile, critics of the court composed the Grand Remonstrance, an itemised list of the king’s alleged misdemeanours. This was narrowly approved by Parliament. Pym and his acolytes were placing the king — a weak man prone to impulsiveness and stubbornness — under intense pressure. Eventually the strain told.
On 4 January 1642, Charles attempted to arrest six especially vocal Parliamentary critics. Five were Members of the Commons, while one sat in the Lords. However, all had fled before the arrival of the king and his party, which included Rupert’s brother, Charles Louis. This clumsy lunge at the court’s enemies was the brainchild of George, Lord Digby. Digby, heir to the earldom of Bristol, would become Rupert’s greatest enemy in the Royalist camp. He had previously been a critic of the king’s advisers, while always stressing his loyalty to the Crown. Digby had argued that the monarch could only function correctly with the cooperation of Parliament: ‘The King out of Parliament hath a limited, a circumscribed Jurisdiction’, he had told the Commons, ‘But waited on by his Parliament, no Monarch of the East is so absolute in dispelling Grievances.’[fn4]
Digby had argued eloquently for Strafford’s impeachment, but had been appalled when radical colleagues insisted on — and gained — the earl’s head. The execution caused Digby to side with the king. His charm and eloquence had quickly earned Charles’s forgiveness. The same gifts went on to win the king’s highest favour. However, the armed intrusion was early evidence of Digby’s poor judgement. The move backfired spectacularly, infuriating much of London and prompting the king to quit his capital. ‘The Five Members’ of the Commons sailed down the Thames in triumph, cheered by supporters celebrating their escape from a king whose key advisers were believed to have lured him into despotism. The failure of Digby’s ill-considered plan greatly increased the likelihood of war.
Charles went first to Hampton Court, then to Windsor. To raise funds, he sold Windsor Castle’s silver plate. In February, afraid that fighting was about to erupt, Charles took Henrietta Maria and the young princesses to Dover. Here the royal party met Prince Rupert, who had come to thank his uncle for his part in securing his release from prison. Although Charles was delighted to see Rupert again, he spent time closeted with the prince, explaining that it would be best if he returned to the Continent: there was still a hope of peace in England, but this would be diminished if the king was seen to have enlisted his warrior nephew. Rupert understood, and accompanied the queen and her daughter Mary to Holland, where the princess was to marry the Prince of Orange. Henrietta Maria took with her some of the Crown Jewels, which she intended to sell. She would invest the proceeds in forces and weapons, to aid her beleaguered husband. Meanwhile, Charles headed for Greenwich for talks with Parliament. The dialogue was bitter and brief.
The king now made for York, keen to put distance between himself and his antagonists, and eager to seize arms that had been stockpiled in Hull since the Bishops’ Wars: after the Tower of London, Hull was ‘the chief magazine in the kingdom for arms and ammunition’.[fn5] However, Sir John Hotham, recently appointed Hull’s garrison commander by Parliament, denied access to his king. Hotham flooded the surrounding fields with water from the Humber and promised to sacrifice his life, rather than surrender the town.
More important men than Hotham now declared against the king. Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, was the 50-year-old son of the dashing Elizabethan courtier who had plunged from favouritism to armed rebellion and paid for his treachery with his life. James I had refused to visit the sins of the father on the son, and allowed Robert to revive the title and repossess the estates that his father had forfeited. Ironically, given his later clashes with Princes Rupert and Maurice, as a younger man Essex had fought against the Hasburgs for the restoration of the Palatinate.
Essex had spent much of the 1630s quietly enjoying his wealth and estates. A brief stint commanding a coastal naval squadron was followed by service as a lieutenant general in the First Bishops’ War. The dispiriting campaign had been followed by a disappointing treaty that Charles I had insisted on brokering himself. The king then further alienated Essex, by failing to thank or reward the earl for his efforts. In January 1642, Charles tipped Essex irretrievably into the arms of Parliament. Egged on by the meddlesome Henrietta Maria, and ignoring the advice of his wisest councillors, Charles asked the earl to resign as Lord Chamberlain of the King’s Household. Six months later Essex accepted his appointment as Lord General of the Parliamentary army. The royal couple had handed their enemies a cautious but competent commander.
*
Both sides in the Civil War claimed to be fighting for the king: it was the definition of kingship that separated them. For most Royalists, the thought of armed conflict against God’s anointed was anathema — an aberration that challenged the cornerstone of their hierarchical beliefs. They saw matters as clearly and simply as Sir Francis Bacon, the Solicitor-General: ‘Where a man doth levy war against the King in the Realm, it is Treason. Where a man is adherent to the King’s enemies, giving them aid and comfort, it is Treason.’[fn6] The Prince of Wales’s chaplain echoed this sweeping condemnation of the Crown’s opponents: ‘Rebellion is a sin that strikes at God’s own self, at the face of Majesty: there is no such express image of God in the world as a King is; every Christian is the Image of Christ as a man, every Minister of the Gospel is (or ought to be) the Image of Christ as Mediator, but a King is the Image of Christ as God, and to rebel against a King is to strike at the face of Christ as God; which was more than they that crucified him durst to do.’[fn7]
The Parliamentarians justified their armed opposition by making a delicate but precise distinction between the king as ruler, and the king as a man. It was quite possible, they believed, to support the king while attacking the evil advisers who were leading him astray. In July 1642, court critics in both Houses joined in a powerful declaration: ‘It cannot be unknown to the World, how powerful and active the wicked councillors about his Majesty have been, both before and since this Parliament, in seeking to destroy and extinguish the true Protestant Religion, the liberty, and Laws of the Kingdom …’[fn8] This subtle separation of loyalties was a common defence throughout Europe at this time and had been employed by rebels in England since the Middle Ages, when justifying resistance to absolute rule. Some critics of the king took their strand of logic past breaking point, openly calling the Royalists ‘rebels’. Parliamentarians looked with disdain on those who offered unquestioning loyalty to the Crown: ‘We found’, a Parliamentarian wrote, when looking back on the start of the war, ‘that the common people addicted to the King’s service have come out of blind Wales, and other dark corners of the Land; but the more knowing are apt to contradict and question, and will not easily be brought to the bent.’[fn9]
The political certainty of both factions was fuelled by strong spiritual allegiances. Continental Europe gave compelling lessons in the importance of binding religious prejudices tight to military ambition. Contemporaries recognised the power of the blend: watching the fighting effectiveness of Gustavus Adolphus’s troops, a British Protestant observed: ‘It is not without a mystery, I suppose, that the old Israelites had an Armoury in their Temple: they would show us, that these two cannot well be parted. And truly, methinks, that a Temple in an Army, is none of the weakest parts of fortification.’[fn10] As the king and Parliament prepared for war, each claimed God’s support.
If religion had been the sole consideration, the prince could have chosen to side with the Parliamentarians, as did his elder brother Charles Louis. Rupert’s Calvinism was in tune with their Puritanism and his family had long benefited from parliamentary support for the Palatine restoration. However, his first loyalties were to the uncle he loved and to the basic principles of royal rule. Charles had been the generous patron of Rupert’s family during its protracted exile, reassuring them of his best intentions even when failing to deliver much of substance. Meanwhile, the king helped to fund his impoverished relations — Rupert received an annual royal pension of £300 — and poured love on his sister and her hapless brood, after Frederick V’s death. He wrote to Elizabeth of Bohemia in 1634:
My Only Dear Sister,
… I could not let this honest servant of yours go without these lines, to assure you of the impossibility of the least diminution of my love to you; the which, as I am certain you easily believe, so I desire you to be assured, that all my actions have and shall tend to your service; and that the counsels and resolutions that come from me, is and will prove, more for your good, than those of any body else: and so I rest
Your loving brother,
To serve you,
Charles R.[fn11]
It was now time to repay the family debt and Rupert did not hesitate in accepting Henrietta Maria’s invitation, in August 1642, to cross once more to England, in support of King Charles. The prince made public his feeling of obligation to the king: ‘And what a gracious supporter hath he been in particular to the Queen of Bohemia (my virtuous Royal mother) and to the Prince Elector, my Royal brother, no man can be ignorant of: if therefore in common gratitude I do my utmost in defence of His Majesty, and that Cause whereof he hath hitherto been so great and happy a patron; no ingenuous man but must think it most reasonable.’ Rupert stressed the high regard in which Europe held his uncle, judging him ‘the most faithful and best defender of the Protestant Religion of any Christian Prince in Europe, and is so accounted by all the Princes in Christendom.’
Rupert also countered those who painted him as a foreign mercenary, eager to ply his warrior trade whatever the cost to the native population: ‘I would to God all Englishmen were at union amongst themselves, then with what alacrity would I venture my life to serve this Kingdom against those cruel Popish Rebels in Ireland.’[fn12] This last point was in response to enemy claims that Rupert and his men were secretly fighting for Catholicism.
In the same defence against his tormentors, Rupert revealed his views on the correct relationship between a monarch and his subjects. It was an uncompromising creed: ‘Suppose that he [Charles] had swayed his Sceptre with a strict hand, reining in the bridle of Authority with harsh Taxation and Tyranny (which it is too well known he did ever abhor as infections to his Sacred Person) yet I say were it so, the Subjects are not thereupon to withdraw their Obedience and Duty neither by the Laws of God nor the Laws of Man, for they are however or at leastwise should be still his Subjects …’[fn13] Such sentiments were succinct, traditional, and unburdened by profound analysis.
*
Rupert’s first attempt to reach England failed. He set off across the North Sea on a 42-gun ship, the Lyon, with his brother Maurice. Accompanying them were Rupert’s chief engineer, Bernard de Gomme, a Walloon; and his favourite explosives’ expert, Bartholomew de la Roche, a Frenchman. Parliamentary sources reported: ‘In this ship Lyon, Prince Rupert and Prince Maurice, with divers other commanders, came in her from Holland, but after three days and three nights storm at sea, not having eaten nor drunk in all that time, these two Princes were in a sick and weak condition, and the ships set to sea again for the North of England, leaving them sick in Holland.’[fn14] The Prince of Orange secured another vessel for Rupert and his party. They set off again, leading a lesser vessel — a galiot — containing weaponry for the coming campaign.
Rupert’s passage was difficult. As his party approached Flamborough Head, on the Yorkshire coast, the Parliamentarian ship the London bore down on them. ‘What are you doing?’ the Parliamentarian captain hollered. ‘We are cruising,’ replied Colster, captain of Rupert’s vessel, while the prince stood next to him in a mariner’s cap. ‘What is the galiot?’ persisted the master of the London. ‘It is a Dunkirk prize,’ Colster lied. The suspicious Parliamentarians insisted that the galiot be searched. Rupert ordered Colster to sail on, prompting the London to summon assistance by firing her cannon. When two more enemy ships appeared on the horizon, Rupert told Colster to head directly for shore.
The prince and his men rowed to safety and landed at Tynemouth. That night the galiot set off again and took its much-needed contents to the Royalist haven of Scarborough.
Rupert wasted no time. He rode for Nottingham, which Charles had made his base, through fields rich with summer crops — the harvest of 1642 was to be especially bountiful. However, he was delayed when his horse lost its footing, throwing him to the ground and dislocating his shoulder. When he eventually reached Nottingham, he found that his uncle had departed for Coventry. Rupert set off south to join him. En route, the prince learnt that Coventry had closed its gates to Charles, its rebel garrison firing on his flag. The king, bewildered by this show of aggression, had moved on to Leicester. Rupert changed direction once more, arriving at Leicester Abbey, where he found his uncle with a tiny army. Its cavalrymen, under Henry Wilmot, had performed poorly in a skirmish. They were immediately entrusted to the prince’s command.
The rank of General of Horse was much coveted. Military manuals of the time insisted that such a position be filled by a figure of rare qualities, reflecting the cavalry’s pre-eminence on the battlefield: ‘Cavalry, so called of Cavallo (which in the Italian and Spanish signifieth a horse) is worthily esteemed a most noble and necessary part of the military profession,’[fn15] recorded a military expert, in 1632. The same authority continued: ‘The General of the Horse, as being one of the principal Chiefs of an army, must be a soldier of extraordinary experience and valour; having in charge the nerve of the principal forces, and on whom the good success of many designs and actions dependeth, as being most usually executed by the Cavalry, especially in battles: where the charging of the enemy in good order usually giveth victory; and contrariwise, the disorders of the Cavalry often disturb and disband the whole army.’[fn16]
The question for more seasoned veterans was whether the smooth-faced Rupert had either the experience essential to such a key position or the ability to transform the ragbag cavalry into a disciplined force. The German prince had bravery, they knew. He also possessed great charisma and style, his impressive figure topped with a plumed hat and ending in fine leather cavalry boots, while his back was swathed in the swish of a scarlet cloak. However, the sum total of his military experience was slight: the action at Rheinberg, four sieges, the cavalry charge at Rheine, and the defeat at Vlotho. Since then, he had been a prisoner of war. He had been absent during three years when some of them had been perfecting their skills on continental battlefields. They looked to Rupert to prove his worth in the crucial, senior position allotted him by his uncle.
On 22 August 1642, when Charles raised the royal standard at Nottingham, it was less a declaration of war than an urgent call for supporters to rally to the Crown. The first night that it flew above the town, the royal standard was blown over. In a superstitious age, this was interpreted as an ill omen for the king’s cause. Certainly, if the Royalists were to have a chance, reinforcements were direly needed: Sir Jacob Astley, the king’s general of infantry, and a former military tutor of Rupert’s, warned that without more men, he could not be sure that he could prevent Charles being ‘taken out of his bed, if the rebels should make a brisk attempt to that purpose’.[fn17] Charles’s army numbered about 2,000 men — a quarter of the size of Parliament’s force, based in Northampton. Some of the king’s men had seen service in the Thirty Years’ War, but most of them were amateurs who were present because of a simple belief that it was their duty to support their monarch. Clarendon recalled the disparity between Rupert’s cavalry and Parliament’s, in the late summer of 1642: the prince’s men ‘were not at that time in number above eight hundred, few better arm’d than with swords; while the enemy had, within less than twenty miles of that place, double the number of horse excellently arm’d and appointed’.[fn18] In London there was optimism that the king’s inability to raise a sizeable army would compel him to bow quickly to Parliament.
Rupert set about equipping and reinforcing his men. The training of horses for battle was as important as the schooling of their riders. John Vernon, who served in the Royalist cavalry, wrote of how best to prepare a horse for war:
You must use him to the smell of gunpowder, a sight of fire and armour, hearing of drums and trumpets, and shooting of guns but by degrees. When he is eating of his oats you may fire a little train of gunpowder in the manger, at a little distance from him, and so nearer by degrees. In like manner you may fire a pistol at a little distance from him in the stable, and so nearer by degrees, and so likewise a drum, or trumpet may be used to him in the stable. The groom may sometimes dress him in armour, using him sometimes to eat his oats on the drum head. In the fields when you are on his back, cause a musket[-eer] and yourself to fire on each other at a convenient distance, thereupon riding up unto him with speed, making a sudden stand. Also you may use to ride him up against a complete armour set on a stack on purpose, that he may overthrow it, and so trample it under his feet, so that by these means, the horse finding that he receiveth no harm, may become bold to approach any object.’[fn19]
By the end of September, Rupert had 3,000 cavalry and dragoons (mounted infantry), most of whom had received some training. He had begun to establish that reputation for tireless energy that was to be his trademark: ‘This Prince, like a perpetual motion’, reported an agitated Parliamentarian historian, ‘with those horse that he commanded, was in short time heard of in many places at great distances.’[fn20] With the myth came hostility and fear. Rupert and his younger brother Maurice were quickly made hate figures by their enemies: ‘The two young Princes, Rupert especially, the elder and fiercer of the two, flew with great fury through divers counties, raising men for the King in a rigorous way … whereupon the Parliament declared him and his brother “traitors”.’[fn21]
Rupert relied on continental military practices, and in so doing revealed what the Earl of Clarendon, an ally but no friend, termed ‘full inexperience of the customs and manners of England’.[fn22] On mainland Europe it was normal to force the local population to fund the army in the field, through levies and confiscations: the Thirty Years’ War general, Wallenstein, invented the dictum, later borrowed by Napoleon, that ‘war should support itself’. In early September Rupert wrote an ultimatum to the mayor of Leicester, demanding £2,000 for the king ‘against the rebellious insurrection of the malignant party’. Although signed by ‘Your friend, Rupert’, there was nothing friendly about the PS: ‘If any disaffected persons with you shall refuse themselves, or persuade you to neglect the command, I shall tomorrow appear before your town, in such a posture, with horse, foot, and cannon, as shall make you know it is more safe to obey than to resist his Majesty’s command.’[fn23]
The startled mayor immediately referred this alien threat to the king, prompting an apology from Charles: Rupert’s letter, he assured the people of Leicester, had been ‘written without our privity or consent, so we do hereby absolutely free and discharge you from yielding any obedience to the same, and by our own letters to our said nephew, we have written to him to revoke the same, as being an act very displeasing to us’.[fn24] Charles was appalled by Rupert’s misjudgement. At this delicate stage, before Leicester had even declared which side it would support, bullying extortion had no place.
Rupert’s gaffe played into the hands of Parliamentary propagandists. From the moment the king’s enemies learnt that Rupert was coming to Charles’s aid, they portrayed him in the blackest light. He was condemned for being sinfully ungrateful for the efforts made on his family’s behalf by England’s Protestants. The prince would never be forgiven for siding against those who had so vociferously championed the Palatine cause.
It was not long before the propagandists presented him to a credulous public as the epitome of immoral soldiery. There was a determination that the most eye-catching of the Royalist leaders should be characterised as wild, dangerous, and even devilish. He was portrayed as a deviant, who enjoyed sex with his white poodle, Boy, and with a ‘Malignant She Monkey’. A Parliamentary pamphleteer enjoyed imagining the creature’s sexual repertoire:
this monkey is a kind of movable body that can cringe and complement like a Venetian courtesan, though her face be not so handsome; yet all her gestures and postures are wanton and full of provocation, she being nothing else (as many others are) but a skin full of lust; her eyes are full of lascivious glances, and generally all her actions do administer some temptation or other; so that she cannot choose but work upon Prince Rupert’s affections; and if he were any thing effeminate as it is not to be doubted but he is forward enough in expressions of love as well as valour; for as the Spanish painter wrote in a Church window sunt with a C. which was an abomination, so her name is an emblem of wantonness, sunt written in that manner being often called a Monkey, which is a kind of prophanation, and thus you see what Prince Ruperts Monkey both nominally and figuratively signify, she being in all her posture the picture of a loose wanton, who is often figuratively called a Monkey.[fn25]
It was not particularly subtle stuff.
His men suffered from similar slanders. Parliamentary printing presses began to use the term ‘cavaliers’ to demonise their enemies. It was an expression of contempt that had arisen from the excesses of the Spanish trooper, the caballo, during the Thirty Years’ War. ‘He’s the only man of all memory’, the author of The Character of a Cavalier stated, ‘whose unworthy actions will perpetuate his memory to ensuing generations. His very name will be odious; and when Posterity … shall find his name mentioned in our Annals, they will be inquisitive to know the Nature of the Beast: This Skellum, this Nigro carbone notatus, this Monstrum horrendum.’[fn26]
Parliamentary leaders encouraged people to give money and silver to their cause, rather than remain vulnerable to ‘several sorts of malignant men, who were about the King; some whereof, under the name of Cavaliers, without having respect of the laws of the land, or any fear either of God or man, were ready to commit all manner of outrage and violence; which must needs tend to the dissolution of the Government; the destruction of their Religion, Laws, Liberties, Properties; all which would be exposed to the malice and violence of such desperate persons, as must be employed in so horrid and unnatural an act, as the overpowering [of] a Parliament by force.’[fn27] Violent, destructive, malicious, and overwhelmingly dangerous: Parliament’s image of the cavalier had taken form before Rupert’s arrival in England. However, he was presented as the quintessential example of this cursed phenomenon.
Meanwhile, the Royalists wanted Rupert — ‘our most Gracious Prince’ — to be seen as a positive influence on their admittedly undisciplined force. He was adamant, they argued, that his troopers ‘should behave themselves fairly, not doing any harm, to man, woman, or child, giving them strict Command, that they should commit no Outrage whatsoever against any of His Majesty’s loving Subjects, neither should they take any thing from them by violence’.[fn28] When any of his men’s crimes were reported to him, it was claimed, Rupert dished out swift and decisive justice.
Among Parliamentary pamphleteers, there were occasional flashes of honesty about the shortcomings of some of their own: ‘I answer that it is true indeed that some of the Parliament’s army are as bad as the Cavaliers’, one conceded, ‘and such as are a very shame to the cause they pretend to stand for, & it were to be wished they were all cashiered, although there were but Gideon’s army left behind.’[fn29]
A generation before the outbreak of war, Henry Peacham had written an unflattering description of the typical English gentleman: ‘To be drunk, swear, wench, follow the fashion, and to do just nothing, are the attributes and marks nowadays of a great part of our Gentry.’[fn30] The Cavaliers were credited with all these debauched and dissolute ways. Fear of their capabilities was heightened as hostilities increased.
The recipients of this nickname, however, were keen to cast themselves in a more forgiving light. One writer in early 1643 talked of ‘the Cavaliers, whom now we see with our eyes to be the Flower of the Parliament, Nobility and Gentry of the Kingdom’.[fn31] An imaginary conversation in The Cavaliers’ Catechism broadened the theme:
Question: ‘What is your name?’
Answer: ‘Cavalier.’
Question: ‘Who gave you that name?’
Answer: ‘They who understood not what they did when they gave it; for it was intended to my infamy, but it proves to my dignity, a Cavalier signifying a Gentleman who serves his King on horseback.’
Question: ‘I pray you tell me what Religion you are of, for it is generally reported of you Cavaliers that you are all most infamous livers, atheists, Epicures, swearers, blasphemers, drunkards, murderers, and ravishers, and (at the least) Papists.’
Answer: ‘To these and the like scandalous aspersions, I will only say thus, (in brief, Sir) that as I cannot excuse all of our Party (no more than you can all of yours) so I cannot but in Conscience (according to my ability) be bound to defend & vindicate the major part of us from such malicious, and fraudulent calumniations …’[fn32]
The dark imagery of the rapacious Cavalier was an attempt to counter the reputation Rupert’s horsemen had won in the public mind, in the early months of the conflict.
*
The personal myth of Prince Rupert began to blossom from the outset of the Civil War. It is so varied and rich that separation of fact from embellishment is often difficult. There were many eyewitnesses present, however, when Rupert, while passing through Stafford, stood in the garden of a Captain Richard Sneyd and fired his ‘screw’d horseman’s pistol’ at a weathercock on top of St Mary’s Church. He managed to hit it from a range of 60 yards — an astonishing achievement in an era when the handgun was notorious for its inaccuracy. Charles I dismissed the shot as a fluke, prompting Rupert to fire again. He repeated the feat. A visitor to Staffordshire two generations later could report ‘the two holes through the weathercock tail (as an ample testimony of the thing) remaining there to this day’.[fn33]
Another credible episode was one the prince enjoyed recounting: when seeking food from a widow, Rupert asked her what her opinion was of the infamous royal nephew. ‘A plague choke Prince Rupert,’ she replied. ‘He might have kept himself where he was born; this kingdom has been the worse ever since he landed.’
Less plausible are tales that were nonetheless believed at the time. These yarns endowed Rupert with almost supernatural powers. As part of his wizardry, it was said that he was a cunning master of disguise. One such story told how Rupert met an apple-seller, and bought 10 shillings’ worth of apples from him, before a mischievous thought came to him:
‘Hold thy hand,’ said the Prince; ‘there is a piece for thee: now hold my horse, change habit with me, and stay here while I sell thy apples — only for a merry humour that I have — and at my coming back I’ll give thee a piece more.’ The fellow willingly lent him his coat and hat, and away went the Prince, selling the apples through the [Parliamentary] army, at any rate; viewing their strength, and in what kind they lay; and, returning to the fellow gave him another piece, with this charge: ‘Go to the Army and ask the commanders how they liked the fruit Prince Rupert, in his own person, did but this morning sell them.’[fn34]
The reader would be forgiven for expecting this merry tale to conclude with appearances by Little John and Will Scarlet. It is difficult to accept that even someone of Rupert’s reckless courage would risk himself in such a perilous exploit. He was one of the most distinctive-looking of men, his great height of 6 foot 4 inches making him 9 inches taller than his average contemporary. However, the tale of the prince selling apples to the enemy in their own camp was accepted by many as fact, not just through gullibility, but because such yarns fitted an established pattern of story-telling.
The folklore surrounding Rupert’s more improbable deeds stem from a cult thriving at this time — that of the gentleman outlaw. Robin Hood was the most popular mythological figure in this tradition: the yeoman bandit who first appeared in Piers Plowman in the 1370s had, by the late sixteenth century, been accorded noble status as Robin, Earl of Huntingdon. One of the best-known tales of his derring-do was ‘Robin Hood and the Potter,’ which celebrated Robin’s ability to wrong-foot enemies by concealing his identity with brilliant cunning. Robin ventured into his enemies’ camp, disguised in much the same way as Rupert was said to have been. It is an ancient, English story-telling device: the hero as daring chameleon. Over five hundred years before, Hereward the Wake, a Saxon rebel leader, was said to have played a similar trick on his Norman opponents, dressing as a fisherman to inspect his enemies’ siege works, before returning to torch them later in the day. That Prince Rupert inspired similar tales shows the fear he provoked, but also the respect that was grudgingly given to a prominent foe who was considered formidable, dangerous, and resourceful.
The notion of a man of royal blood resorting to criminal subterfuge would not have surprised Caroline England: half a century earlier, Shakespeare had dramatised the youthful misdemeanours of Prince Hal, the future Henry V, when led astray by Falstaff and his guttersnipe band. John Taylor, the self-styled ‘Water Poet’, celebrated this irresponsible phase in 1630, placing Hal, ‘the Robber Prince’, in the pantheon of famous English lawbreakers:
Once the fifth Henry could rob excellent well,
When he was Prince of Wales, as Stories tell.
Then Friar Tuck, a tall stout thief indeed,
Could better rob and steal, than preach or read.[fn35]
Rupert, like his princely predecessor two and a half centuries beforehand, was seen as a young warrior whose hot blood lured him into terrible transgressions. The young Palatine, though, was a foreigner, whose peccadilloes were harder to forgive. Furthermore, he had no credit to his name to touch that of Agincourt. His reputation could be blackened without fear; the greater his achievements, the more they must be presented as the sinister accomplishments of a high-born but devilish reprobate.
The image of the prince was coloured not just by outlaw romance, but also by the acts of real contemporaries. They joined high birth and personal courage to thrillingly daring, dastardly deeds. One such cad was John Clavell, a gentleman thief whose crimes were well known to Charles I’s England: arrested in 1627, he attempted to justify and atone for his misdeeds with a series of pamphlets and plays detailing his exploits, many of which were greatly embellished. Clavell, from a good family that had fallen on hard times, was sole heir to a rich uncle. His unfortunate decision to become a highwayman — which he termed a ‘knight of the roads’ — saw him die impoverished, soon after the outbreak of the Civil War. His life of criminality showed that slyness and skulduggery were not the monopoly of the poor and the desperate, but could be attributed to those of gentler blood.
It was easy for Parliamentarian propagandists to seek to undermine Rupert’s qualities and talents by tapping into this vein of popular story-telling. They presented the prince’s legendary luck as the outrageous tricks of a highborn scoundrel. One of the many nicknames given to Rupert early in the Civil War was ‘Prince Robber’.
*
The profile of the prince as foremost Royalist champion was reinforced when he openly challenged the Earl of Essex to fight. The prince, recently made a Knight of the Garter — England’s highest chivalric honour — accused Essex of seeking the crown for himself, and invited him to bring his army to combat the Royalists at Dunsmore Heath on 10 October 1642. This, Rupert claimed, would settle the two sides’ differences in a day: it would be ordeal by battle. ‘And’, offered Rupert, ‘if you think it too much labour and expense to draw your forces thither, I shall as willingly, on my own part, expect private satisfaction as willingly at your hands for the same, and that performed by a single duel; which proffer, if you please to accept, you shall not find me backward in performing what I have said or promised. I know my cause to be so just that I need not fear; for what I do is agreeable both to the laws of God and man, in the defence of true religion, a King’s prerogative, an Uncle’s right, a Kingdom’s safety; think it therefore not strange that a foreigner should take foot upon your English shore with intention to draw the sword, when the Law of Arms prompts him on to that Resolution.’[fn36] It was this sort of posturing — sincere, forthright, but overconfident — that allowed Rupert’s enemies to represent him as hopelessly arrogant.
Yet Rupert’s military worth was soon revealed. His ceaseless energy made one Parliamentarian write that the prince ‘slashed through the land as the lightning that strikes from one quarter of the Heaven to the other’.[fn37] One of his tasks was escorting silver from Oxford University to the safety of Royalist Shrewsbury. Resting at Powick Bridge, 3 miles south of Worcester, he and his men were taken by surprise by 1,000 Parliamentarians in the first notable encounter of the war.
Rupert immediately leapt onto his mount, urged his men to follow him, and led the counter-charge. Unnerved, the Parliamentarians, discharging their firearms ‘at too uncertain a distance, did no execution; but the front of Prince Robert’s troops coming on, discharged just at their breasts, and quite cut off the front: Serjeant Major Byron shot a bullet into Douglas’s belly; Prince Robert, his brother [Maurice], and Sir Lewis Dives slew each a man; Colonel Wilmot singled out Colonel Sandys, and gave him his death-wounds’.[fn38]
The rebels withstood another round of fire from Rupert’s men, but the third time they were shot at, at point-blank range, they broke and fled. In the ferocious quarter of an hour of fighting, and in their subsequent flight across a river, dozens of Parliamentarians were slain or drowned, including some of their most promising officers. Their commander, Colonel Sandys, his life ebbing away, repented his disloyalty to the king: Dr Watts, Rupert’s chaplain, received his dying words, which were full of regret. Only a handful of Royalists died at Powick Bridge, though several of the officers who had been at the forefront of the charge were wounded: ‘Prince Maurice hath received two or three scars of honour in his head, but is abroad and merry,’[fn39] Lord Falkland wrote; while Lord Wilmot’s back was slashed by an enemy sword and Sir Lewes Dives was shot in the arm. Rupert, though ‘he ventured as far as any trooper of them all’,[fn40] remained unharmed. He wrote to his uncle: ‘Your Majesty will be pleased to accept this as a beginning of your Officers’ and my Duty; and I doubt not, as (certainly) they behaved themselves very bravely and gallantly, that hereafter Your Majesty shall find the same behaviour against a more considerable number. Of this Your Majesty may be very confident.’[fn41]
‘This victory’, a Parliamentarian later conceded, ‘was of great consequence to the Enemy, because [it was] the omen and first fruits of the war.’[fn42] Clarendon, in his chronicle of the Civil War agreed, recalling that the Parliamentary forces ‘talked aloud of the incredible, and unresistible courage of Prince Rupert, and the King’s Horse’.[fn43]
It remained to be seen how the charismatic young general and his spirited cavalry would fare in the more structured arena of set-piece battle.