Defeat Without Victory
‘Charles, it is very fit for me now to prepare for the worst . . . wherefore know that my pleasure is, whensoever you find yourself in apparent danger of falling into the rebels’ hands, that you convey yourself into France, and there to be under your mother’s care; who is to have absolute full power of your education in all things, except religion.’
‘We are now entering upon a time, the representation and description whereof must be the most unpleasant and ingrateful to the reader, in respect of the subject matter of it; which must consist of no less weakness and folly on the one side than of malice and wickedness on the other.’
All this time, Elizabeth and Henry had remained in London. The king’s pleas that they be allowed to join him in Oxford fell on deaf ears and the attempts of two of his equerries to speak to the children were rebuffed. Their official guardian from October 1642 was Philip Herbert, fourth earl of Pembroke, the descendant of a family that rose to prominence from humble Welsh antecedents through marriage to Queen Katherine Parr’s younger sister, Anne. The fourth earl had been in favour at court during the reign of James I, but, despite a passion for hunting and the arts, his relationship with Charles I gradually soured. Hen rietta Maria disliked him, perhaps because he was a godly Protestant, and the king never really forgave Herbert’s commitment to making terms with the Scots in 1640. Thereafter, the earl’s alienation from the court gained pace. He voted for Strafford’s attainder and was dismissed from the office of lord chamberlain at the queen’s suggestion. It was not surprising that these contretemps, and a long-standing rivalry with the marquess of Hertford, a royalist with a country seat in Wiltshire like himself, drew him into the parliamentary cause. His outlook and lineage made him a suitable choice, in the eyes of both Houses of Parliament, to have official oversight of the king’s younger children. But he was much taken up with parliamentary affairs and Elizabeth and Henry’s daily routine reverted briefly to the supervision of the countess of Roxburghe when she returned from the Netherlands.
Lady Roxburghe was distressed by what she found. The children’s situation during much of 1642, while she was still overseas, was one of straitened circumstances. Parliament had refused to allow the allocation of taxation that had hitherto supported Elizabeth and Henry’s household at St James’s. Economies imposed on the household were having an impact on everything from dress to diet. When Pembroke took up his appointment, both Houses agreed that Elizabeth and Henry’s expenses, temporarily covered out of their father’s own privy purse, should be met by the Royal Mint. But it was politics, rather than impoverishment, that spurred Princess Elizabeth into action at the end of 1643. The settlement of their financial affairs had an unwelcome outcome. An inspection of the establishment at St James’s was ordered and pictures that might offend Presbyterian sensibilities were removed. More unsettling than these decorative changes was a requirement that the royal children’s servants, particularly their chaplain and religious advisers, should reflect the views of the king’s opponents. All persons about them, including their governess, should subscribe to the Solemn League and Covenant. Those who rejected it were to be removed forthwith. The immediate effect of this stricture was the inevitable dismissal of most of the household.
Unwell (as she often was) and deeply upset, Elizabeth, at eight years old, was unable to face the loss of those closest to her. She took matters into her own hands and appealed directly to the House of Lords on 16 December, in a letter she entrusted to Pembroke to present on her behalf:
I account myself most miserable that I must have my servants taken from me, and strangers put to me. You promised me that you would have a care of me, and I hope you will show it, in preventing so great a grief as this would be to me. I pray, my lords, consider of it, and give me cause to thank you.1
This simple epistle caused some consternation. The Upper House did not know of the Commons’ unilateral action in respect of the royal children and on demanding an explanation invoked privilege, saying that appointments of servants in the household of Elizabeth and Henry could not be made without their approval. A committee of seven lords, including Pembroke himself and the earls of Northumberland and Manchester, was appointed to look into the matter and its recommendations were subsequently im plemented. The new household was certainly reasonably generous for two younger members of the royal family. By the time of its inception, Lady Roxburghe was dead and the countess of Dorset, who had known the children from their earliest years, was appointed once again to the role of governess. In addition, Elizabeth was provided with a lady of the bedchamber and four ladies-in-waiting and Henry was given his own staff of attendants. Overall, the household had two physicians, one of whom was Sir Theodore de Mayerne, as well as six chaplains, pages, domestics and tutors.
Elizabeth had won something of a victory though she and her brother were not free. The gates of St James’s were to be locked every evening at sunset and the oath taken by members of the household expressly stated that they were not to foment ‘disaffection or misunderstanding between any of the king’s children and either House of Parliament’. Attempts at communication between the royal court at Oxford and the children in London were to be reported immediately. Charles I protested at the change in his offspring’s conditions and even suggested a prisoner swap but this was refused on the grounds that Elizabeth and Henry were not, in fact, prisoners. The king was roundly told that parliament ‘hoped they should take as good care of the souls and bodies of his Majesty’s children, as those at Oxford would have done’.2 Despite this statement of intent, which was no doubt made in good faith, Elizabeth was largely housebound for much of 1643, as the result of a fall while running across a room in St James’s, which broke her leg. It healed only very slowly. An examination of her remains in Victorian times showed that she suffered from rickets and she was probably prone, in any case, to the leg problems that had afflicted her father and grandfather.
Immobile she might have been for much of the high tide of royalist success but the recompense in Elizabeth’s life was mental activity. Her father’s foes did not deprive her of educational opportunities; indeed, they were committed to ensuring that the princess and her brother, when he became old enough, would become learned English Protestant members of the ruling class. Though Henry had two older brothers and there was, at this point, no question of deposing the king himself, still it was thought desirable that the prince be brought up in ways that did not perpetuate Charles I’s views of kingship. For the present, while still so young, he had little companionship as a very small boy apart from his sister. Elizabeth, on the other hand, was very fortunate to have her intellect stimulated by a remarkable lady tutor, Bathsua Makin.
Mrs Makin (her first name is a variant of the Hebrew name Bathsheba) was the elder daughter of Henry Reginald, a school-master from Stepney in east London. She was about forty years old when she first began to teach Princess Elizabeth in 1640. Makin was described as ‘the greatest scholar, I think, of a woman in England’ by the diarist Sir Simonds D’Ewes, who had been a pupil with her at her father’s school, and Elizabeth was fortunate to have this exceptionally gifted woman as a teacher. But then Elizabeth herself was an outstanding pupil. Under Bathsua’s guidance, she became an impressive linguist for one so young, attaining a high level of ability in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, Italian and Spanish. For her age, the princess outshone her Tudor namesake, Elizabeth I. Bathsua also taught her charge mathematics, perhaps inspired by the prowess of her brother-in-law, the noted mathematician John Pell. Nor was the princess the only pupil of this industrious and clever lady. She instructed the countess of Huntingdon and her children, corresponded with continental scholars and was interested in medicine. When she was presented to James I as a young woman of outstanding linguistic skill, the ‘Wisest Fool in Christendom’ is reported to have asked, with characteristic spite, ‘But can she spin?’ Her entrée into royal employment was probably based on her reputation and her marriage to Richard Makin, who was a junior member of the king’s household. She may well have been a demanding teacher, since Pell described her as a woman of ‘no small impatience’. Elizabeth seems, however, to have thrived under her guidance. In the princess’s isolation and amid the uncertainties of the first Civil War, Mrs Makin, who had given birth to eight children of her own, provided stability and stimulation.
In March 1645, an important change took place in the lives of Elizabeth and her brother when Algernon Percy, tenth earl of Northumberland, took over Pembroke’s role as their guardian. One of the grandees of the parliamentary cause, Northumberland came from a family that had long been the most influential in the north of England and one that had already spawned more than its fair share of over-mighty subjects. Conflict with the Crown was something that ran in the blood of the Percys. Algernon’s father had spent sixteen years in prison for alleged complicity in the Gunpowder Plot and the two preceding earls, his grandfather and great-grandfather, were both executed for treason. But the tenth earl had little direct contact with his northern heritage, having been born in London in 1602. His relationship with the court after his father’s death was somewhat faltering; it took time for this descendant of a rebellious house to establish himself in royal favour. But the queen seems to have approved of him, perhaps because his views in foreign policy were pro-French and his sister, Lucy, countess of Carlisle, was one of her ladies. In 1638 Charles I made him lord admiral. Initially friendly with Strafford, Northumberland believed the second Bishops’ War to be a profound mistake and its outcome disillusioned him at a time when he was suffering a good deal of ill health. By 1640, he had become an opponent of royal policy, believing in a balanced constitution and limitation of the royal prerogative. This scarcely made him a firebrand and he was certainly not a religious extremist. Unsettled by royalist successes in 1643 he had, for a time, favoured peace but the king’s rebuff to such overtures at Oxford hardened his resolve. After the Scots joined the war he was appointed chairman of the Committee of Both Kingdoms in 1644 but it was the failure of further peace negotiations around the so-called Treaty of Uxbridge, one month before he assumed responsibility for Elizabeth and Henry, which hardened his attitude.
Caught up with the day-to-day business of parliamentary committees and the management of the war, Northumberland, like their previous guardians, was too busy to see much of the royal children or, indeed, his own small son, the child of his second marriage to Lady Elizabeth Howard. A careful and considered man whose natural reserve came across sometimes as coldness, his principles and high sense of duty made him an entirely appropriate choice as the official custodian of the royal children and he took his responsibilities towards them with all the seriousness of his nature. Clarendon said of him that his measured demeanour ‘got him the reputation of an able and wise man; which he made evident in the excellent government of his family, where no man was more absolutely obeyed; and no man ever had fewer idle words to answer for’.3 Another of his sisters, Dorothy Percy, countess of Leicester, spoke more warmly of the ‘truth and fidelity in him’. Elizabeth and Henry could have fared much worse, especially as Lady Dorset, who was in receipt of a generous allowance from parliament for her service to the royal children, died within two months of Northumberland’s appointment.
*
At the same time that Northumberland was assuming responsibility for his younger brother and sister, Prince Charles’s life was also undergoing a major change. With royalist fortunes now much more uncertain, the king decided it was time for his heir to be moved to a safer place and to take command (at least nominally) of his own forces. Bristol was chosen as the Prince of Wales’s headquarters because it was a strategic gateway to the vitally important south-west. The project had first been mooted the previous spring but the prince could not be persuaded to go then. Nearly a year later, he did not demur. On 4 March 1645, in pouring rain, he took leave of his father and departed from Oxford. Despite the inclement weather as he headed west, the mood was far from being one of despair, nor was there reason to suppose that father and son would never see each other again.
Charles was well supported in his new environment. The acting governor of the city, in Prince Rupert’s absence, was Sir Ralph Hopton, one of the most able of royalist generals. The prince was also accompanied by his governor, the earl of Berkshire, two veteran soldiers, the earl of Brentford and the earl of Capel, and two highly capable civilian advisers, Lord Culpeper, master of the rolls, and Sir Edward Hyde. On paper, it was a reasonably well-balanced group but Hyde had nursed considerable misgivings about the wisdom of dividing royalist command in this way (two other appointees, the earls of Southampton and Richmond, refused to go) and the role of the king’s commanders in the region, Sir John Berkeley, Sir Richard Grenville and Lord George Goring, vis-à-vis the council was never clarified. Thus the capacity for confusion and resentment was present even before the Prince of Wales arrived in Bristol. It would only get worse.
In part, this was because of a clash of personalities. Whatever the military skills of his colleagues, Hyde possessed by far the superior intellect, and he knew it. He was most certainly not a dashing Cavalier in appearance. Then in his mid-thirties, he looked rather like a chubby-faced child surprised to find himself uncomfortably in a man’s body. Hyde had been intended for the Church as a younger son, but when his elder brother died he changed to the study of law at Oxford, enjoying the intellectual circles of the Middle Temple in London and getting to know the playwright Ben Jonson. His first marriage, prematurely cut short by his wife’s death, brought him into the circles of the Villiers family and the Wiltshire aristocracy. During the 1630s he was part of the circle that formed around Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, at Great Tew in the Oxfordshire Cotswolds.4 Hyde was a man who knew how to take advantage of the opportunities that came his way, notably a meeting with Archbishop Laud in 1635. By the time the crisis of 1640 arrived, he had, he felt, managed to balance his country and court interests well and though he believed that England was prospering, he was concerned about royal and judicial abuses of the law, especially the use of ship money as a form of regular taxation. But, whatever his reservations, a strong allegiance to the Church of England coupled with outstanding ability in drafting meant that he agreed to stay on in London to draft statements of royal policy when Charles I fled the city at the beginning of 1642. Hyde was, by this time, convinced that parliament’s demands for political and religious reform would overthrow the rule of law and must be resisted. He was at Nottingham with the king when the royal standard was raised. Respected by the king, he joined the Privy Council and was made chancellor of the exchequer after being knighted in February 1643. He had risen far from his gentry background in Wiltshire.
He had never, though, been an advocate of an aggressive solution to the confrontation with parliament. His strengths were with the written word and in understanding that dividing the king’s opponents did not have to be done at the end of a sword. Hyde was no fighting man. Committed as he was to serving Prince Charles, he did not really know the fifteen-year-old, nor did he have the prince’s trust. Confident and lawyerly, he was easy to dislike and ill health – he suffered badly from gout – did not help his mood. Although Hyde saw clearly that divided lines of command in the West Country were impeding the royalist cause, his attempts at improving the situation met with resentment. Even if he had been successful in this still-important theatre of the war, it would have, in the end, made little difference. By the midsummer of 1645, parliament had reconstructed its army and cast the doubters, both at Westminster and in the military, adrift. The effects of this sea change would lead to disaster for the royalist cause in the heart of England.
*
If there was acrimony in the council of the Prince of Wales in Bristol and divisions among the royalists in Oxford, there were severe recriminations and much soul-searching among the king’s opponents as 1644 ended. The earls of Manchester and Essex seemed unwilling to prosecute the war to a successful conclusion and the peace party in parliament, egged on by the Scots on the Committee of Both Kingdoms, sent a set of proposals to Charles, the abortive Treaty of Uxbridge, that were so extreme that they never stood the slightest likelihood of acceptance. These were precisely the sort of divisions that Hyde’s well-honed political and legal instincts would have liked to exploit but it was not to be. By the Self-Denying Ordinance, passed in the Commons on 19 December 1644, all peers and members of the Commons who held army commands were stripped of the possibility of doing so for the rest of the war. This legislation was a necessary precursor for the removal of the dilatory aristocrats who seemed increasingly unwilling to pursue an outright victory; its ultimate aim was to create what soon became known as the New Model Army. The necessity for change, and the dangers of not effecting it speedily, were made clear by Cromwell when he rose in the House of Commons in support of the measure: ‘If I may speak my conscience without reflection upon any, I do conceive if the army be put not into another method, and the war more vigorously prosecuted, the people can bear the war no longer, and will enforce you to a dishonourable peace.’5 The measure met more opposition in the House of Lords, but was steered through by Lord Saye and Sele, a mainstay of the original ‘noble revolt’ against Charles I, and by the earl of Northumberland, custodian of the king’s younger children. Sir Thomas Fairfax became commander-in-chief of the army with Cromwell as his second in command.
Royalist critics sneered at the New Model, claiming its officers were lowly born, while Presbyterians feared that it represented the military wing of the rising, if amorphous, religious movement known as the Independents. Neither claim could be substantiated in 1645 but they have powerfully affected the ‘Roundhead’ image in the popular mind over the centuries. The New Model was slow to get up to strength at the beginning of 1645, allowing the royalists to seize the initiative briefly in the south-west. Here the Prince of Wales was to find that he had little authority in practice when his father unwisely made Goring commander-in-chief of all the forces in the west. Goring was not lacking in personal bravery but he was hot-headed, impossible to get on with and his force was wildly ill disciplined and hated by the local population. His new appointment, one of the king’s most serious misjudgements, infuriated Prince Charles’s council, Prince Rupert and all the other commanders in the region. Nor was there anything he could do to help the king in Oxford, besieged by parliament and beset by contradictory advice from those around him. Following the ruthless slaughter of parliamentary supporters at Leicester by Prince Rupert’s forces at the end of May, the Committee of Both Kingdoms decided to abandon the siege of Oxford and take more decisive action. They ordered a much relieved Fairfax to engage the king’s army as soon as possible.
On 5 June he left Oxford, making his way north towards the royalists who occupied a strong position atop Borough Hill outside Daventry in Northamptonshire. His army was in position to make a final advance by the evening of 11 June, despite very wet weather and the late arrival of muskets badly needed by some of his unarmed men. The royalist forces under Prince Rupert were spread out and resting, their patrols apparently relaxed, the horses turned out to feed. King Charles had spent the day hunting in nearby Fawsley Park. It was not until the late afternoon of the following day that contact was made between the two armies when the outriders of Fairfax’s cavalry surprised royalist outposts near Daventry. Up till then, Rupert was entirely unaware of how close his enemies were. Very soon, he discovered that it was not just its proximity but the size of the opposing army that posed a very serious threat. He had gravely miscalculated the strength of his foe.
What to do? In conference with his uncle, it was decided that the best option was to retreat northward and try to make a stand at Belvoir Castle. A circuitous route was taken to try to throw off Fairfax’s army but, unknown to Rupert, he was being shadowed every step of the way by the New Model’s cavalry. And Fairfax was also in possession of a vital piece of intelligence that had been intercepted before it reached Rupert and the king: Goring would not be there if they gave battle. Explaining that he was unable to leave the West Country, Goring exhorted Rupert not to engage the enemy until he arrived. Heartened both by the realization that an important part of the royalist army would not be involved and by the arrival of Cromwell, Fairfax determined to fight.
Aware by now that they had failed to shake off the parliament arians who dogged their every footstep, the king and his commanders held a council of war at 2 a.m. on Saturday, 14 June. They had by now reached Naseby in Northamptonshire, seven miles from Market Harborough. As was so often the case with the royalist high command, the king received contradictory advice. Rupert, who has often been criticized for what happened at Naseby, did not, in fact, favour giving battle. Digby and Ashburnham, however, felt that retreat was dangerous and demoralizing and their view prevailed with the king. And so, amid the little valleys and streams of open countryside so typical of the area, the royalist cause was to suffer a defeat from which it never really recovered.
‘That dismal Saturday’, as the diarist Richard Symonds referred to the Battle of Naseby, began early as scoutmasters on both sides strained in the dawn light of one of the longest days of the year to see the preparations being made by their enemies and the armies moved slowly to take up position. Eventually they lined up only about a thousand yards apart. The king’s forces of around 10,000 men were outnumbered by Fairfax’s New Model which was around 14,000 strong. The royalist infantry, though composed of professional soldiers (many were Welsh), was significantly smaller and it was they who would suffer the most losses in casualties and prisoners taken. Cavalry numbers were more equal, though even here the advantage lay with the parliamentarians, who had about 6,600 horses to the king’s 5,000. And, as at previous battles, the royalist cavalry was ill disciplined, leaving the field at a crucial juncture to attack the parliamentarian baggage train.
The fighting began around ten in the morning when the royalists attacked along the entire length of Fairfax’s line. Their infantry and the cavalry of Princes Rupert and Maurice inflicted substantial casualties, severely wounding Cromwell’s son-in-law, Henry Ireton, and Philip Skippon, the veteran commander of the parliamentary foot, who refused to leave the field, despite his injuries. He was ‘shot through the right side under the ribs, through armour and coat, but not mortal, yet notwithstanding he kept his horse and discharged his place and would by no means be drawn off until the field was won.’6 The tide began to turn when royalist cavalry units under Sir Marmaduke Langdale were routed by Cromwell, but, unlike his foes, Cromwell’s highly disciplined horsemen were not permitted to ride willy-nilly off the field. Most remained and were turned against the royalist infantry. As the desperation of the situation became apparent, Charles I had to be dissuaded from leading a counter-charge in person. The king was certainly not lacking in personal bravery but it would have made no difference, except for putting his own person in danger. Instead, he left the field by midday as his infantry surrendered in droves. More than 4,500 prisoners were taken by the New Model, who also attacked the royalist baggage train, slaughtering and maiming the female camp followers in an act of singular barbarity. There was nothing romantic about Naseby.
It remains, however, the most important battle in English history since Hastings. Cromwell believed that God had been with parliament’s forces and it was to Him and the soldiery that he gave the victory, telling Fairfax: ‘He that ventures his life for the liberty of his country, I wish he trust God for the liberty of his conscience, and you for the liberty he fights for.’7 These themes were ones that the newly appointed lieutenant-general of the New Model Army would return to many times in the years to come, even if the House of Commons, in an early indication of trouble on the horizon, was reticent about too much emphasis on liberty and deleted the entire passage from the published account of his speech. Paradoxically, the Lords allowed it to be printed in full.
But for the present it was the king who had suffered by far the greater public relations disaster. In his baggage train, the victorious parliamentarians found all his secret correspondence with Henrietta Maria. It revealed that he was considering extending toleration to Catholics and using an army from Ireland, as well as European mercenaries, to hold on to his throne. When the collection was printed, under the title The King’s Cabinet Opened, recriminations were immediate and Charles I’s image suffered permanent damage. He could, perhaps, take some comfort from the fact that neither of his two eldest sons was with him at Naseby, though Prince Charles had been obliged to quit Bristol because of a serious outbreak of the plague.
Naseby was a turning point in the Civil Wars. Charles I would never again accompany a large army into the field in defence of his Crown. But the outcome did not necessarily seem quite so clear-cut to contemporaries. The king himself had certainly not given up hope. From Naseby he made his way west into the Midlands and thence over the border into Wales, a country whose men had fought gallantly for him in June 1645. From Cardiff at the end of the following month he wrote to the leading Irish nobleman, the marquess of Ormonde, revealing that he had by no means given up hope of help from that quarter. His letter is tinged with sadness and perhaps a hint of desperation but it is typical of the man: ‘It hath pleased God,’ he wrote, ‘by many successive misfortunes, to reduce my affairs, of late, from a very prosperous condition to so low an ebb as to be a perfect trial of all men’s integrity to me, and being a person whom I consider as most entirely and generously resolved to stand and fall with your King, I do principally rely upon you, for your uttermost assistance in my present hazards.’8 Ormonde was indeed willing to stand and fall with his king, whether Charles I or his eldest son. But he was not able to help the monarchy materially at this point. Much more distressing was the bitterness between the king and his nephew, Prince Rupert, which would soon ensue.
The defeat at Naseby shook Rupert profoundly. He was immediately sent onwards to Bristol, to defend the city against the attack from Fairfax that everyone assumed must be coming. But he believed that his uncle must now treat for peace, as he stated in a letter he wrote to the duke of Richmond:
It is now in everybody’s mouth that the King is going for Scotland. I must confess it to be a strange resolution, considering not only in what condition he will leave all behind him, but what probability there is for him to go thither. If I am now desired to deliver my opinion, which your lordship may declare to the King, his Majesty hath no way left to preserve his posterity, kingdom and nobility, but by a treaty. I believe it is a more prudent way to retain something than to lose it all.9
Thus spoke the pragmatic politician and supporter of the royal House of Stuart but it was not advice Charles I’s conscience wanted to hear. The king was perfectly lucid in his assessment of his situation, as can be seen in a letter he wrote to Rupert:
I confess that speaking as a mere soldier or statesman, I must say there is no probability but of my ruin; yet as a Christian I must tell you, that God will not suffer rebels and traitors to prosper, nor this cause to be overthrown. Whatever personal punishment it shall please Him to inflict on me, must not make me repine, much less make me give over this quarrel; and there is little question that a composition with them [the rebels] at this time is nothing else but a submission, which by the grace of God I am resolved against whatever it costs me; for I know my obligation to be both in conscience and honour, neither to abandon God’s cause, injure my successors, nor forsake my friends.
This letter is key to understanding Charles I. He was not deluded about the likelihood of a successful military solution, though he always placed too much confidence in his ability to divide his opponents and exploit their weaknesses. Rebels were, to him, morally deficient and, as such, he saw them as fair game. And he expected complete loyalty from those who served him: ‘He that will stay with me at this time must expect and resolve either to die for a good cause or, which is worse, to live as miserable in maintaining it as the violence of insulting Rebels can make him.’10
Bristol was the only port city remaining in royalist hands in the south-west of England. It was of paramount importance to Charles I’s fading hopes and Rupert had initially assured his uncle that he could hold the city for four months. This assertion proved to be over-optimistic. By 23 August 1645, Fairfax’s army of 15,000 men encircled the city, outnumbering Rupert’s defenders by three to one. Nor did the prince have the support of Bristol’s inhabitants, who had been heavily taxed during its occupation and were now dropping from the plague. Nevertheless, the attackers met brave resistance as they stormed the alarmingly high city walls and the fighting continued for six hours – longer than the battles of Edgehill, Marston Moor or Naseby. Ultimately, Rupert simply did not have the manpower to repel Fairfax’s troops. He was offered honourable terms and, after consulting with his council of war, who supported his decision, surrendered. Carrying their swords, his men were allowed to leave unhindered on their march to join the king at Oxford. Rupert, ever-conscious of who he was, cut a magnificent figure in defeat. ‘Clad in scarlet, very richly laid in silver lace, and mounted upon a very gallant black Barbary horse’, he rode with Cromwell and Fairfax on the first two miles of his journey.11 It was the closest he ever came to either of them. Rupert was a professional soldier and had made a professional soldier’s choice. He knew he could not win and that holding out longer would have cost more lives. But his relationship with his uncle was permanently damaged.
Charles I was appalled by Rupert’s surrender. From Hereford on 14 September he wrote that it was ‘. . . of so much affliction to me, that it makes me not only forget the considerations of that place, but is likewise the greatest trial of my constancy that hath yet befallen me.’ Brutally dismissing the charismatic young man who had risked his life to serve him, he ended: ‘My conclusion is, to desire you to seek your subsistence, until it shall please God to determine of my condition, somewhere beyond seas; to which end I send you a pass; and I pray God to make you sensible of your present condition and give you means to redeem what you have lost.’12 A few days later he wrote to Prince Maurice, Rupert’s younger brother, that ‘this great error of his (which indeed hath given me more grief than any misfortune since this damnable rebellion) hath no ways proceeded from his change of affection to me or my cause, but merely by having his judgement seduced by rotten-hearted villains.’ Rupert certainly had long been at odds with several of the king’s other commanders, notably Digby, who hoped that his disgrace would be permanent.
Relations between uncle and nephew remained tense; Rupert’s temperament was not such that he would take continued insults, like the dismissal of his friend, Will Legge, as governor of Oxford, lying down, and Maurice naturally supported him. Gradually, matters improved, though Rupert was never returned to the command he had previously enjoyed. Both brothers remained in Oxford as Charles I’s position grew bleaker, despite his efforts to buy time by appearing willing to treat with parliament and the involvement of the French, at Henrietta Maria’s behest, in a scheme which would have seen the Scottish army desert their English allies and fight for the king in return for the establishment of Presbyterianism as the state religion of England. This was a price Charles was not prepared to pay, much to his wife’s annoyance. Henrietta Maria thought one heretic was as bad as another and took the view that any promise to them could easily be rescinded in practice. But as the future of the king seemed increasingly uncertain, so, too, did that of his children, scattered in different parts of the country. The Prince of Wales was roaming ever westward trying to elude Fairfax, James remained at Oxford and Elizabeth and Henry moved between St James’s Palace and Syon House. Theirs was the most secure existence. But the greatest adventure in 1646 was that which befell the king’s youngest daughter, Princess Henrietta, and her intrepid governess, Lady Dalkeith.
*
The infant princess remained in Exeter as her father’s fortunes declined. The first year of her life was tranquil and in August 1645 Prince Charles spent a month in the city, during which time he visited his sister. She would only just have been learning to walk and talk, though in speech, as would later become apparent, she seems to have been somewhat advanced for her age. The Stuarts had a strong sense of family and Charles was always fond of his siblings. Henrietta would become his special favourite, despite the gap in age of fourteen years between them. But his father’s injunctions that he must not be captured meant that he could not tarry. Shortly after he left, the combined armies of Fairfax and Waller closed in on Exeter and Lady Dalkeith was faced with a difficult decision. If she stayed, her charge would, like the rest of the inhabitants, be subject to the hardships of a siege with an unknown outcome. If she tried to escape and was captured, then Henrietta, like Elizabeth and Henry, would become a ward of parliament. Initially, the governess thought of obtaining a pass to take the little girl to Cornwall, having been ordered by the queen to remove the princess at the first sign of danger. But the letters were intercepted and Henrietta’s situation soon became entwined with that of the Prince of Wales. The parliamentarians were determined to prevent his passage out of the country. Hyde put it bluntly to Jermyn that it was not possible to protect both the prince and his sister if they tried to flee and that the priority must be Charles. ‘Had it been done,’ he wrote of trying to get Henrietta to France at this stage, ‘all security for the prince’s safety would have passed away.’13
In Paris, the queen was beside herself with worry and berated Lady Dalkeith for what she saw as dereliction of duty. This was entirely unjust and Hyde came gallantly to the governess’s defence:
I think it will break her heart when she hears of the queen’s displeasure; which pardon me for saying is with much severity conceived against her. I’ll be bold to say, let the success be what it will, that the governess is as faultless in the business as you [ Jermyn] are and hath been as punctual, as solicitous and as impatient to obey the queen’s directions as she could be to save her soul. She could not act her part without assistance; and what assistance could she have? How could she have left Exeter and whither have gone . . .14
Whither indeed? Throughout the winter Lady Dalkeith, chaplain Thomas Fuller and the other members of the princess’s small household remained in Exeter, as stocks of food dwindled and the besieging army tightened its grip. By spring, Sir John Berkeley, the town’s governor, felt that it was impossible to hold out any longer and agreed surrender terms. On 13 April 1646 he escorted Henrietta and her governess as far as Salisbury, having negotiated with Fairfax that the princess, her belongings and household should eventually be located in a residence of the king’s choosing but that their maintenance should be paid by parliament. Charles I wanted his daughter to be near the capital. He did not want her to come to him at Oxford, for the simple reason that he was intending to leave there himself, though this was kept secret from even those closest to him. Lady Dalkeith thought Richmond the most appropriate place for Henrietta but parliament disagreed. The order came for the princess and her servants to take up residence at Oatlands, where they remained for three months at Lady Dalkeith’s personal expense, since the allowance promised by parliament was not forthcoming.
At the end of May the order came from the House of Commons for Princess Henrietta to join Elizabeth and Henry at St James’s, under the supervision of the earl and countess of Northumberland. Lady Dalkeith was determined to resist this development but she did not wish to seem to be defying it outright. Instead, she procrastinated, writing to the House of Lords in late June that she was under injunction from the king not to leave the princess, who was, as far as she was concerned, ‘to be disposed of according to His Majesty’s directions’. She went on to point out ‘that I have preserved Her Highness, not without many cares and fears, from a weak to a very hopeful condition and constitution, that my coming into these parts was voluntary’ – this was not true, given the circumstances in which she had left Exeter and the king’s own commands for his daughter – ‘that I have disbursed a great sum of money for the support of Her Highness and her family’ – this meant her household – ‘since the treaty at Exeter.’ She went on to claim that that she was perfectly willing ‘to be subordinate to my lord and lady Northumberland, and, from time to time, receive and follow their directions concerning the Princess . . . all my desire now is to be continued about her person . . . without being any kind of burden to the Parliament, or inconvenience to my lord and lady of Northumberland.’ She asked again for reimbursement of her expenses and concluded that she could not, in all honour and honesty, hand over the king’s child to parliamentary authority without his express consent.15
After waiting another month, in which no reply to this heartfelt but also clever missive was received, Lady Dalkeith decided to take matters into her own hands. She would personally smuggle little Henrietta out of England. Her plot was simple but also required strong nerves and the greatest secrecy. Her designs must be kept from all of the princess’s household except the most trusted servants and the French valet who was to pass as her own husband. On 25 July 1646, she set out on foot from Oatlands to walk to Dover, intending to take a boat for France. Princess Henrietta was dressed in rough clothing and disguised as a boy. Although only two years old, the child was accustomed to being treated like royalty and could not be persuaded that this was an enjoyable game, or to keep quiet. When her ‘parents’ referred to her as Pierre she piped up that she was not Pierre, but a princess and that the clothes she was wearing were not hers. Fortunately for Lady Dalkeith, no one encountered on the road seems to have taken the toddler’s indignation seriously. The unlikely trio reached Dover without impediment and crossed to France.
The discovery that the princess and her governess were missing caused great alarm to the rest of the staff left behind at Oatlands but this was alleviated when they received a letter from Lady Dalkeith. She had, she said, awaited parliament’s pleasure with patience but had been unable to obtain any justice for Henrietta or for herself, or, indeed, any of them. She urged them to ‘go to the king’ if they could (an indication of how little she actually knew about the king’s situation) and also to conceal her flight for as long as possible.16 So parliament did not know that Charles I’s youngest child was gone until she had, in fact, arrived in France. The princess’s mother was overjoyed by this unexpected development and sent carriages and appropriate clothes to Calais. The reservations felt by Henrietta Maria about Lady Dalkeith’s earlier failure to remove her daughter from Exeter were now all gone. The lady herself was so shattered by the stress of the preceding months and the perils of discovery that she fell ill on arriving at the palace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where the queen was living. When she recovered, she found herself a royalist heroine; poems were written about her escape with the princess and the English ambassador described the adventure as ‘a pretty romance’. It was certainly one that appeared to have a happy ending but the future was uncertain. The little princess, later described by her eldest brother as ‘an Exeter woman’, never saw the city of her birth again. She would return just once to England, in 1660, by which time she had long become Princess Henriette Anne.
The removal of this youngest member of the royal family was no matter of great regret for parliament. It relieved them of the necessity of finding financial support and its propaganda value to the royalist cause was minimal, given the situation of Charles I. Lady Dalkeith’s suggestion to Princess Henrietta’s gentlewomen that they should seek assistance from the king was bizarre, since he was no longer free. On 27 April he had slipped out of Oxford in the middle of the night, disguised as a servant, with only his chaplain, Mic, his long-standing confidant, accompanying him. His intentions, as was often the case with Charles I, are unclear. At first, he took a roundabout route to London, getting as close as Harrow, but if he was expecting some kind of message of support, or a safe conduct, anything that would allow him to re-enter his capital on terms that satisfied him, this never materialized. So he rode north into Norfolk, staying near to the coast, which might have provided him the opportunity of escaping overseas. His preferred option, however, was to stay on English soil and seek armed help from a different source. For some months, the French ambassador to Scotland, Montreuil, had been negotiating with the Scots on his behalf but there was still no written assurance of support. Charles hesitated, sending Hudson into the Scottish camp at Southwell near Newark in Nottinghamshire to see if they could be persuaded before committing his future to them. Verbal assurances, but no more, were given that the Scots would declare for the king if parliament failed to restore him. Apparently accepting that this was the best he could hope for, the king arrived at the Scottish camp at seven in the morning on 5 May 1646. In the words of the great Victorian historian of the Civil War, Samuel Rawson Gardiner: ‘He fancied himself to be a guest, but the days of his captivity had in fact begun.’17
*
The fortunes of his two eldest sons now took different direct ions for several years. Prince James, left behind in Oxford with no word of comfort or parting letter from his father, felt understandable anxiety. Later he would use the most clipped and unemotional words he could find to explain this abandonment: ‘The king had it once in his thoughts,’ he wrote, ‘to have carried the Duke along with him, but did not.’18 His cousins Rupert and Maurice were still with him, as were his servants and tutors, but their situation over the next two months, while Oxford attempted to withstand the parliamentary army, grew increasingly dire. Fairfax had all the weaponry and manpower he needed for a long siege and as the city was already running low on food, James, desirous to show that he would share the hardships of the defenders, declared that he would accept a halving of his rations. This gesture played well with royalist propaganda but Fairfax could trump his enemies in the publicity, as well as the military, stakes. He sent wagon-loads of butter, game and lamb into Oxford as gifts for the young duke of York, thus emphasizing that not only was he unwilling to see the king’s second son endure unnecessary hardships but that he also had plenty of supplies for his own army. He reasoned that there could be important advantages in keeping a good relationship with the prince, whose father was now a prisoner of the Scots and whose elder brother, the Prince of Wales, was on the run. James’s proximity to the throne and his still (it was hoped) impressionable age meant that he could be viewed as a serious candidate for the Crown in the more moderate monarchy that many wished to see by 1646. The future of the duke of York was a key topic for the discussions that resulted in the surrender of Oxford. Parliament realized he was a prize worth having and were keen that no harm should come to him. James, who stood on his dignity from a very young age, believed that this was out of deference to his rank and it might be argued that such was the case, but not for the reasons that he understood at the time. His days in Oxford were numbered. The city surrendered on 20 June 1646. The palatine Princes left two days later with passes allowing them to go overseas. Rupert had been reconciled with his uncle before Charles fled Oxford but neither he nor Maurice had any future in England. They went their separate ways, Rupert to France to join Henrietta Maria’s court and Maurice to Holland. Their thirteen-year-old cousin, however, was to join his younger sister and brother, Elizabeth and Henry, in London by the express order of parliament. So Prince James returned to the palace of his childhood and much happier times, the residence of a sister he had not seen for five years and a little brother he could hardly remember, to be placed, like them, under the guardianship of the earl of Northumberland. For two years he was, at least, to know something resembling a family life, though it was not one he would have chosen and he did not make it easy for himself or his increasingly stressed hosts.
Northumberland was placed in an unenviable position when he assumed the additional responsibility as custodian of the duke of York. He had to balance the need to continue as normal as possible a daily routine of lessons, exercise, religious observance and leisure activities against the need for security and vigilance, while at the same time hoping to avoid giving offence to anyone. Elizabeth and Henry were, by this time, used to their surroundings and the constraints put on them, but James was not. He bitterly resented the removal of all his servants, including a little dwarf who was especially dear to him. The replacement of his household by parliamentary nominees, who all represented a different way of thinking and perhaps displayed less deference than he believed his due, infuriated him. Northumberland discovered that his new charge had a hot temper and was less malleable than his younger siblings. The earl, anxious to make the prince’s life as bearable as possible, spent considerable amounts of his own money, above the allowance awarded to him by parliament. He kept detailed monthly records of his expenditure on the royal children in a separate account book. It gives a fascinating picture of the manner in which the children were treated.
While personnel of the household may have changed, the status accorded to the children was still that of royalty. There are bills for buttons, silks, worsted for stockings, caps, garters, ribbons and shoes. There were footmen (James had his own), coachmen, grooms and postilions to convey them from St James’s Palace to Northumberland’s other residences, notably Syon House in Middlesex, and all these servants were decked out in appropriate livery. Northumberland had to meet the cost for board and lodging for these staff which could amount to more than £200 a year, or about £25,000 today. This is not a minor sum of money for someone whose northern estates had suffered badly during the war, to the tune of £42,500 by 1646, or at least £6 million in modern money. On top of this, he had to pay for horses and their feed and for hounds so that the duke of York could hunt, which he did frequently in the winter of 1647–8. Even the costs of James going by river to Lambeth were noted. These glimpses into the daily lives of the royal children suggest that it was not all the reciting of catechisms and hearing of godly sermons. They were evidently permitted to travel in some style and, in the case of James, to enjoy recreational activities outside St James’s Palace, though such journeys must have presented the earl of Northumberland with security concerns.19 James may have loved the hunt and was never keen on books, though he did acquire a reasonable command of French. While he was with Elizabeth and Henry his education, interrupted by the course of the war and the hardships at Oxford, was resumed under Princess Mary’s former tutor, John Durie.
The possibility that his second son was being considered as a replacement for his own occupancy of the English throne reached the king’s ears while he was being held by the Scots at Newcastle during the summer of 1646. Charles I was quick to bring it to the attention of Jermyn and Culpeper, who were with the queen in France. Pressure was being brought to bear on Charles, and not just from the Scots but the queen as well, to abandon episcopacy and he was resisting: ‘How can I keep that innocency which you (with so much reason) oft and earnestly persuade me to preserve, if I should abandon the Church? Believe it, religion is the only firm foundation of all power.’ He went on to add that there was a great desire among the rebel leaders ‘to make the Duke of York king’. He wanted pressure brought to bear on France ‘to declare for my restoration and set some visible course on foot to order it’.20 While the young duke himself may have been unaware of the speculation surrounding his name, the consideration being given to his status was genuine, for by that time his elder brother was already in France.
*
Throughout that difficult spring and early summer, when both his father and his younger brother became captives of the different forces threatening the Stuart dynasty, Prince Charles had been on the outermost fringes of the British Isles. Late in the evening of 2 March he left Pendennis Castle near Falmouth in Cornwall aboard a frigate, optimistically named the Phoenix, bound for the Scilly Isles. With him went a rag-tag group of supporters, who had seen the royalist strongholds in the southwest fall one after the other to the New Model Army. Despite this, their loyalty was such that they were prepared to share whatever dangers lay ahead. For some, at least, discomfort and hardship were present almost from the moment they landed on St Mary’s, the largest of the scattered island group on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. Lady Ann Fanshawe, wife of the writer, linguist and diplomat who was the Prince of Wales’s secretary for war, described vividly the hardships of this little band:
The next day, after having been pillaged and [being] extremely sick and big with child, I was set ashore almost dead in the land of Scilly. When we had got to our quarters near the castle where the Prince lay, I went immediately to bed, which was so vile that my footmen ever lay in a better . . . But when I awaked in the morning I was so cold I knew not what to do, but the daylight discovered that our bed was near swimming with the sea, which the owner told us afterwards, it never did so but at spring tides. With this we were destitute of clothes, and meat or fuel . . . and truly we begged our daily bread of God, for we thought every meal our last.21
Sensing that the heir to the throne might be slipping from their grasp, the two Houses of parliament politely requested his return. They received a deceptively soothing response, signed by Charles, though probably written by his advisers, saying that the Scillies were poorly provisioned and that he had selected Jersey as his next destination, a part of his father’s dominions from which he could correspond with, and receive orders from, parliament. Given the proximity of Jersey to France, this reassurance had a hollow tone. But Charles did not stay long on the Scillies. Less than a month after his arrival a parliamentary fleet surrounded St Mary’s. Fortunately for the prince a fierce spring storm dispersed it. Departure for Jersey was now imperative and Henrietta Maria, in Paris, grew increasingly anxious. ‘I shall not sleep in quiet,’ she wrote to Sir Edward Hyde, ‘until I hear that the Prince of Wales shall be removed from thence.’22 On 16 April, Prince Charles and about 300 followers, soldiers, courtiers, Cornish officials, clerks and their families, landed safely on Jersey, despite the pilot’s nearly wrecking them on the harbour rocks.
The prince was warmly greeted by the island’s governor, Sir George Carteret, and proceeded to familiarize himself with the island. He liked what he found and his council were confident that, at least for the foreseeable future, the island offered security, though its neighbour, Guernsey, was held by parliament. Charles set up a little court at his residence, Elizabeth Castle, and from there carried out military inspections and ordered new forts to be constructed. His sixteenth birthday was celebrated with great rejoicing on 29 May and he passed his time pleasantly enough. He learned to sail, a passion which stayed with him for the rest of his life, and engaged in pleasantries with the local ladies – perhaps, in fact, more than that, for there were rumours afterwards that he had sired a child during his stay. Yet though the queen in France wrote to her sister in more positive terms about Charles’s safety, saying that he was on ‘a small island that is still ours’, she was applying more and more pressure for her eldest son to come to her in France.
The prince’s council, as was so often the case, was divided on the wisdom of such a move. Hyde, Hopton and Berkshire were opposed to his going, believing that it would sit badly with public opinion. Hyde called it ‘a matter of so great importance, on which the fate of three kingdoms might depend’. His great fear was that removing the prince to France would unite the Presbyterians and the Independents, whose quarrels were, by the summer of 1646, becoming obvious. His arguments fell on deaf ears. In late June, Henry Jermyn arrived on the island under instructions from Henrietta Maria to return with the prince. Jermyn would not listen to Hyde’s reservations. The queen had earlier written to Charles that she believed that he could not stay longer in Jersey without falling into the hands of the king’s enemies and she included a copy of a letter she had received from the king which said that ‘his preservation is the greatest hope for my safety, and, in God’s name, let him stay with thee, till it is seen what ply my business will take. And, for my sake, let the world see that the queen seeks not to alter his conscience.’23
Prince Charles, who had not been keen to go to Paris as a penniless dependent of his young cousin, Louis XIV, now capitulated to parental commands. For more than a year, he had watched his council argue destructively and seen his father’s hopes disappear. Jersey had been a pleasant interlude but he felt he could not stay. The dissenters on his council, led by Hyde, refused to accompany him to France and resigned.24 Bad weather delayed his departure for several days. He left on 25 June, going aboard ship with Digby and Jermyn each taking one of his arms, apparently afraid he might change his mind at the last minute. He landed at Saint-Malo and made his way overland to Saint-Germain, where he was reunited with his mother on 19 July. Not all the wider group of followers who had accompanied him to Jersey went with him to Paris. Ann Fanshawe returned to London while her husband stayed in Caen in Normandy, a city which would be a temporary home to many Protestant royalists. But for Prince Charles, fourteen miserable years of exile lay ahead.