‘A foreigner begging your bread’
‘I wish the Prince in any place out of France if it were possible.’
Edward Hyde, March 1647
‘To a gentleman, any country is his homeland.’
Cardinal Jules Mazarin, 1637
Henrietta Maria was elated to be reunited with her eldest and youngest children in the space of a month, the more so because the two years she had already passed in France had been far from easy. Initially, the queen had felt happy to be back in France, a country which she never really left emotionally. Despite the closeness of her marriage to Charles I and the enjoyable life they led together she remained a Bourbon princess. Henrietta divided her time between apartments at the Louvre and Saint-Germain, her childhood home, but the comforting familiarity of Paris and her position as a member of the French royal family were not quite what they seemed at first. Times had changed, not just in England, but in France as well. The queen and her group of courtiers were exiles and no amount of proximity to the French throne could disguise the fact that they were short of financial support. At a court where lavish display was the hallmark of regal magnificence, Henrietta Maria, who had sold most of her jewels in support of the royalist cause, cut an increasingly forlorn figure as the years of her exile went by. She was awarded a pension of thirty thousand livres a month for her household expenses (a rough equivalent today is about £327,500), an amount that had to stretch to support Prince Charles when he arrived, and, in due course, his brother, James. It appears generous but with an increasing number of penniless royalists to support, it was soon swallowed up. And though France had initially rejoiced in the return of its Bourbon princess, Henrietta was not at the centre of events. The thirty rooms she occupied at the Louvre may have been hung with royal tapestries but the king and his mother lived at the Palais Royal, the impressive palace built by Richelieu.1 She was still indefatigable in her letter-writing and her political machinations, ably supported by Henry Jermyn, a man whose abilities were derided by Hyde and whose reputation has suffered badly until recent work has revealed a more interesting and competent person.2 In fact, Henrietta was increasingly dependent on Jermyn as the years of separation from her husband grew longer, though their relationship was almost certainly not the secret romance imagined in torrid historical novels. So the queen was not isolated but she was removed from the reality of what was taking place in England. Yet the possibility of complete defeat never seems to have entered her mind. She was convinced that her husband could ride out the storm and successfully divide his enemies, perhaps even return stronger, if only he would compromise on religion. To her, any promises he made to rebels would be meaningless. They were just a means to an end. After more than twenty years of marriage she still did not understand her husband’s conscience or appreciate the depth of his belief in his own interpretation of kingship. And the tall, unforthcoming son who now arrived to join her was himself something of a mystery to her.
Prince Charles seems to have passed his early months in France keeping his thoughts well hidden as he tried to analyse what was going on around him. This may have been the result of a mixture of commendable reserve and necessity, since he neither spoke nor appeared to understand very much French. His hosts were quite confounded by how tongue-tied he was and found him rather aloof. That may have suited him, since he had much to learn and very little to give away. For he had come to a land ruled by a child, though governed by a Spanish queen regent of Habsburg descent (and therefore doubly the enemy of France in historical terms) and an Italian cardinal from unremarkable origins in Rome. The country’s large and quarrelsome aristocracy could, without careful handling, themselves foment discontent. So it would not have taken a great deal of perspicacity to work out that, whatever the lavish lifestyle of the French court, the throne might not be on the firmest of foundations, as events were to demonstrate only too clearly in the very near future. But for the time being, the prince was dependent on the goodwill of his mother’s sister-in-law, the queen known as Anne of Austria, and her closest adviser, Cardinal Jules Mazarin.
*
The queen regent is an interesting and often overlooked figure. Alexandre Dumas did her no favours when he depicted her as a helpless heroine in The Three Musketeers. The real Anne was a survivor rather than a beautiful ingénue adrift in the currents of skulduggery of seventeenth-century France. There was, however, much in her long and often unhappy life in France that reads more like fiction than fact. Born in Valladolid in Spain in 1601, she was the eldest daughter of Philip III of Spain and his wife, Margaret of Austria. A portrait of her as a six-year-old shows an attractive and self-possessed child with fair hair.3 On both sides she was a Habsburg, hence the name which the French gave her. But, whatever their heritage and appearance, the Spanish branch of a house that had roots in Austria had long since adapted to Spanish mores. The infanta Anna was neither dark-eyed nor raven-haired, but she was a true representative of Spain and its interests when she arrived as the fourteen-year-old bride of a reluctant Louis XIII.
It was Anne’s misfortune to leave the very strait-laced, protocol-ridden Spanish court for an environment of intrigue and instability in its traditional enemy, France. Her mother-in-law, Marie de Médici, treated her with contempt and her husband, a difficult young man psychologically damaged by his charismatic father and overwrought mother, had only their unhappy union to use as an example of the pitfalls of a diplomatic marriage when he was thrust into one himself. Although she tried, Anne could never win his trust, much less his affection. Initially dependent on her Spanish ladies for companionship and support, she kept out of French politics as much as possible as a very young woman, following the advice her father had given her. But when Louis XIII overthrew his mother’s favourites and forced her from the regency in 1617, Anne suffered too. When he asserted himself as Charles I was later to do with Henrietta Maria’s French household, Anne learned that her husband was determined to dismiss all but a very few of her Spanish servants. She did not make a scene to match her sister-in-law (who had also behaved badly towards Anne when she first came to France) but the episode was distressing.
Like Henrietta, she learned how to carry on and, again like her sister-in-law, she fell under the influence of self-serving aristocratic women, including the ubiquitous duchess of Chevreuse. Anne’s judgement was often suspect. Buckingham’s ill-concealed admiration for the French queen threatened her reputation when his pleasantries were reported to have turned into an assault on her virtue. She could not get on with her husband’s chief adviser, Cardinal Richelieu, and he was a dangerous enemy. Even more serious was the lack of children. Anne’s first four pregnancies ended in miscarriage, the last caused by her slipping on a highly polished wooden floor while playing games with her ladies. Louis XIII, never the most understanding of men, was furious. And he suspected his wife, justifiably, as it turned out, of secret correspondence with her brother, Philip IV of Spain. To be married to a barren and treacherous wife was more than a fragile man like Louis XIII could stand. For years the couple essentially led separate lives. And then, sixteen years after her last pregnancy, Anne gave birth to a son and heir for the Bourbon dynasty on Sunday, 5 September 1638, at Saint-Germain. She was two weeks short of her thirty-seventh birthday and suddenly there was not just hope, but fulfilment.
The dramatic version of Louis XIV’s conception is that his father was forced by December storms and flooding to spend the night at the Louvre, where Anne was staying. This unexpected arrival meant that his rooms were not prepared and he had to sleep in the queen’s apartments. It is a good story but probably gained in the telling. There is evidence that Anne and her husband may have been on better terms for a while rather than suddenly discovering a mutual passion on a dark and stormy night.4 Certainly Anne was overjoyed, and not a little relieved, to find herself pregnant again after so long. She had worried otherwise that she might be exiled or even put in a nunnery. When she gave birth to a healthy nine-pound boy, her position seemed to be transformed. They called him Louis le Dieudonné (the God-given) and his arrival was greeted with great rejoicing. Two years later Anne gave birth to a second son, Philippe, duke of Orléans. The Bourbon dynasty’s future was assured but relations between the royal couple went downhill again. Unlike Charles I, Louis XIII could not stand his children. He found their response to him and their obvious affection for their mother profoundly irritating, writing of his two-year-old heir: ‘I am most displeased with my son. As soon as he sets eyes on me, he yells as if he were looking at the devil and cries for his mother.’5
Perhaps he was also concerned about the scurrilous rumours being spread about his children’s paternity, at least one of which originated with his own younger brother, Gaston of Orléans. Displaced as heir to the throne by the new arrival, Gaston took offence at his relegation, remarking crudely that he was convinced that the little prince had emerged from his sister-in-law’s belly but that he was not sure how the infant had got there. He would prove to be a notably disloyal and unreliable uncle. Even worse for Anne was the threat that her husband would take her two boys away from her, which nearly drove her to despair and was only averted when little Louis, no doubt heavily coached, sought his father’s forgiveness. His memories of his father were clearly not happy and he seldom spoke of him in later life. The Sun King’s model was his dynamic grandfather, Henry IV, not the querulous figure of a tubercular father, who died when he was only five. Although distraught at her husband’s passing, despite their dismal relationship, Anne of Austria’s moment had arrived. She would soon share it with another, a foreigner like herself.
Jules Mazarin was born Giulio Mazarini in the mountainous central Italian region of Abruzzo and grew up in Rome. His family were not impoverished but were essentially of modest means. His mother came from minor Italian nobility and his father was a client of the powerful Colonna family. It was Giulio’s own early educational attainments that enabled him to enter the Jesuit College of Rome at a time of revival in Italian intellectual and cultural life. A good education, coupled with a pleasing personality and refined manners, suggested that he could pursue a promising career. He soon realized that he had an innate capacity to charm people; in the words of a recent biographer, he was ‘infinitely seductive’.6 He was handsome, witty and set to go far. Quite how far perhaps even he did not yet realize. Lacking the connections that gave such easy preferment to the aristocratic class, he knew he would have to make his own way and his self-belief did not waver. When opportunities came he took them. The first of these was as a companion to the second son of the Colonna family, whom he accompanied during the young man’s studies in Spain. There he learned to speak Spanish – the native tongue of the queen he would later serve – and to live in another country.
When he returned to Rome his father was in financial difficulties and though Giulio studied at Rome’s Sapienza University, where he gained a doctorate in jurisprudence, he did not enter the legal profession. Instead he followed his Colonna patrons into the military during the War of the Mantuan Succession, demonstrating for the first time the diplomatic skills which were to change his life. The Pope, Urban VIII, was impressed by this clever young man who was eventually able to bring about a treaty ending the conflict. Mazarini’s career as a papal envoy took off from this point. By 1634 he was papal nuncio at the French court, where he attracted the attention of Cardinal Richelieu. The wily Frenchman had found a kindred spirit in this personable, cunning Italian who was by now an inveterate gambler. Mazarini saw his advantage in becoming Jules Mazarin and devoting his future to France. ‘I had attached myself to the Cardinal by instinct,’ he later wrote, ‘even before understanding from experience his great qualities.’31 For a man who loved the cards, it was a calculated throw of the dice.
At the beginning of 1640 Mazarin became a naturalized Frenchman and two years later a cardinal. He was impeccably placed to step into Richelieu’s shoes but no one could have foreseen that the first minister and Louis XIII would die within a few months of each other. Louis left his wife as regent but with a carefully selected regency council, including his brother, Gaston, and Mazarin, to make formal decisions. It was now that Anne’s Habsburg heritage came to the fore. The women of her dynasty had been accustomed to exercise authority since the time of Charles V. Fiercely protective of her sons and supremely conscious of the fact that Louis XIV was a king as well as a child, she was not content to take a back seat. Acting with a firmness and determination that belied her reputation for laziness, this woman whose only experience of government had been confined to the running of her own household now stepped firmly into the fray. Within days of her husband’s death she had persuaded the parlement de Paris, the highest court of law in France, to change the terms of her husband’s will. She was given powers to choose her son’s ministers and introduce laws. The man she selected as her chief adviser was Jules Mazarin.
Their relationship was the source of much speculation at the time but it seems to have been one of mentor and pupil rather than of lovers. This does not mean, of course, that there was not a strong emotional bond. Mazarin and Anne communicated in Spanish and for two hours every evening he would brief her in foreign affairs. By the time Henrietta Maria arrived in Paris in 1644, their working partnership was well established. Inevitably, it displeased many, not least Gaston of Orléans, of whom Henrietta was very fond. But she also got on well with her sister-in-law, on whom she was now heavily dependent. When the two women met again, after so many years, they were much changed. Two late pregnancies and the passage of time had considerably increased Anne’s girth and given her several chins. Henrietta Maria, though not yet forty, was thin and frail and looked like a tiny old woman. They embraced and the English queen, recognizing her debt to Anne, would add the latter’s name to that of her youngest daughter when Princess Henrietta (thereafter known as Henriette Anne) arrived in 1646. Anne was never anything other than kind but her focus was bound to be on her son and on France. Obsessed with the situation of her husband back in England, Henrietta Maria had neither the will nor the influence to play much part in French politics. At the beginning, she believed the charming Cardinal Mazarin would support Charles I. His views of the best course for Charles aligned with hers. But, in the end, he would do nothing at all.
*
Henrietta Maria’s hopes were not just for her beleaguered spouse in Newcastle. Prince Charles’s arrival in France presented her with other considerations. The royalist cause would be greatly strengthened if she could bring about a prestigious marriage for her eldest son. And there was an obvious candidate for such a match – her own niece, Anne Marie Louise de Montpensier, Gaston’s daughter. This young lady was three years older than the Prince of Wales and the richest woman in France – indeed, perhaps in the whole of Europe – having inherited the wealth of her mother, Marie de Montpensier, a princess of the blood, when that lady died just one week after she was born. Gaston d’Orléans had made liberal use of his daughter’s fortune for himself, but there was still a great deal remaining. From the English queen’s perspective, the princess seemed an ideal choice. But La Grande Mademoiselle, as her contemporaries called her, had other ideas.
She was a tall, well-made blonde, with a large nose and heavy-set features (a typical Bourbon), and she covered herself in jewels and dressed expensively in all the latest fashions, even if these were not always elegantly displayed. One portrait of her depicts her dressed in a costume which looks like a cross between an early version of Britannia and a Roman goddess. She doted on her father but he paid her scant attention, though he could be affectionate on the occasions when they were together. Brought up as a princess of France by Madame de Saint-Georges, the childhood companion of her aunt, Henrietta Maria, her education had been neglected and she was far from cultured. Later attempts to learn Spanish and Italian met with limited success. The epitome of a poor little rich girl, Mademoiselle was vain and shallow, supremely self-confident and, at nineteen, utterly lacking in any understanding of her effect on others. Convinced, with justification, that she was the greatest catch in Europe, Mademoiselle’s greatest admirer was herself. This feeling did not moderate with time. She would later write:
I am incapable of any base action or dark deeds; I am more likely to show mercy than to render justice. I am melancholy and like to read good solid books . . . I enjoy society and the conversation of well-bred persons . . . Above all others, I like soldiers and to hear them talk about their craft . . . I confess that I talk willingly about war; I know that I am brave, with much courage and ambition . . . I enjoy violins above all other music, and dancing more than I can say . . . No one has ever had any power over me . . . The great sorrows I have known would have killed other people.8
Mademoiselle was a force of nature and her life was to be far sadder than she could have ever contemplated when she was thrust into the company of the young Charles Stuart.
Her goal at this point in her life was to marry the Austrian emperor, Ferdinand III. The penurious Prince of Wales, titular head of a principality whose importance could not have figured prominently in Mademoiselle’s ambitions, was not the sort of suitor to whom she intended to give her hand. Furthermore, she did not warm to him at a personal level, being unimpressed by his swarthy features and taciturn manners. The realization that he could not speak French was appalling to her. How could any European aristocrat be so uncouth? The lack of attraction was mutual, for Charles knew, instantly, that he could not stand Mademoiselle. Only his mother failed to realize that the two young people were totally incompatible.
While her eccentricity was already well established and her modesty non-existent, history does owe a debt of gratitude to Anne Marie Louise. Her copious memoirs, utterly lacking in irony and therefore all the more entertaining, are an important source for historians of the period, revealing, indirectly, much about the exiled Stuarts at a point where concentration has largely been on the fate of Charles I in England. It is, for example, to Mademoiselle that we owe the description of how the Prince of Wales was introduced to his French relatives in the boiling summer of 1646.
In order to avoid the stifling heat of Paris that year, the French court had moved out of the city to Fontainebleau, the castle in a forested area that had been one of the major architectural projects of Henry VIII’s great rival, Francis I, a hundred years before. It was on one of the many roads that criss-crossed the forest that the coach of Henrietta Maria and her son encountered that of the king of France and his immediate French relations: the little duke of Anjou, younger brother of Louis XIV, the queen mother, Gaston of Orléans and his daughter, La Grande Mademoiselle. This apparently chance meeting was, in fact, carefully arranged so as to facilitate introductions without embarrassment. Mindful of the changing events in England and unwilling to risk giving offence by according someone who might be viewed as a renegade the full honours of an official reception, Mazarin and Anne were careful in their handling of a delicate situation. This was to be presented very much as a family affair, a charming coincidence at a rural retreat.
Henrietta Maria’s coach stopped and she and Prince Charles got out to meet the waiting French royal party. The prince was presented first of all to the young king. Neither could have known then that Louis XIV’s reign would be the longest in French history and that his aspirations for France would engulf Europe in war. In 1646 he was a pleasing-looking child of eight with long curly brown hair, close to his mother and already contemptuous of his little brother. Their difficult relationship started early. Louis never did grow tall, like his English cousin, but he had a well-developed sense of his own majesty, even at this early age. It is unlikely that he was overly impressed with the new arrival from England, who certainly looked like a Bourbon but could not converse like one. It might not have occurred to him to be disappointed – Charles meant little to him – but Mademoiselle remembered her own reservations vividly. The prince was, she recalled, ‘only sixteen or seventeen but very tall for his age. His head was noble, his hair black, his complexion brown, his person passably agreeable . . . he neither spoke nor understood French, a most inconvenient thing.’9 Awkward it may have been, but Charles spent the next three days being entertained at Fontainebleau and calling upon all the French princesses of the extended royal family, of whom there were many.
His mother failed to notice the hauteur of her niece towards her son. Henrietta Maria did not give up easily. She assured Mademoiselle that the prince talked of her incessantly and was alarmed to hear that the wife of the Austrian emperor had recently died. Surely the emperor would not want to lose the opportunity of wooing Charles’s imposing cousin. The silent prince, with Prince Rupert in tow as an interpreter, was forced to act as a companion to Mademoiselle throughout the autumn season, accompanying her to the theatre, dancing with her at balls, handing her from carriages to palaces, even holding a candelabra while Henrietta Maria, who had lent the princess her remaining jewels, arranged Mademoiselle’s blonde tresses before an Italian comedy and a fête at the Palais Royal.10 There could be no doubting, on this occasion, that Anne Marie Louise was the belle of the ball:
My gown shimmered all over with diamonds and was trimmed with tufts of carnation, black and white. I had upon me all the crown jewels, as well as those which the Queen of England still owned then. No one was more magnificently dressed than I that day and I did not fail to find many people to tell me of my splendour and to talk about my beautiful figure, my graceful bearing, the whiteness of my skin and the sheen of my blonde hair. These, they said, adorned me more than all the riches which glittered upon me.
None of this adulation inspired the young lady to think more kindly of her English admirer. Her ambition was to become an empress and she was quite clear-headed about her feelings:
I realized that the Emperor was neither a young nor a gallant man, but the truth was that I cared more for my establishment than for the person of my suitor . . . I must not forget to say that at this ball of which I have just spoken, the Queen of England noticed that I looked at her son somewhat disdainfully. When she learned the cause of it she reproached me and said that my head was full of nothing but the Emperor. I defended myself as well as I could, but my face disguised my sentiments so poorly that one had only to look at me to discover them.11
Mademoiselle’s disdain may have owed something to the fact that Prince Charles had spent part of the performance sitting at her feet. This was either a deliciously ironic gesture or the result of weeks of boredom dancing attendance on the vainest woman in Europe.
Charles’s time in Paris was not all duty. His childhood companions, the Villiers brothers, passed through the city on a tour of Europe and offered an agreeable alternative to Mademoiselle’s posturing and the fractious behaviour of his mother’s court, where quarrels and duelling had become a pastime for her hangers-on. The young men followed the eyes of their French hosts and worshipped from afar the beautiful duchess of Châtillon, an object of far greater admiration at the court than Mademoiselle. They visited the shops and strolled the streets of the city, amazed by what it had to offer. The prince may not have been comfortable in the French tongue, but he acquired a permanent admiration for the French aristocratic way of life and the importance of keeping up appearances in an uncertain world. In the coming years, the significance he attached to the perceptions of royalty, to civility and elegance when hardly anything else remained, would serve him well.
Henrietta Maria’s matchmaking schemes came to nothing but they did not set her relationship with her adolescent son on a good footing. Charles was mortified by his mother’s unsubtle behaviour and the friction would remain. Nor did Mademoiselle get her way. Her father was firmly opposed to any marriage with Ferdinand III, saying it would bring her only unhappiness. It is unclear whether the newly widowed Austrian ruler had ever actually considered offering to share his throne with her.12 A marriage with the Prince of Wales was never a serious possibility, no matter how much his mother might have wanted it. Still very young, Charles nevertheless knew that he had better keep his options open. His future, and that of his father, might be compromised if he made the wrong choice. Catholic brides were unlikely to appeal to the opponents of royalism at home. And, as the year 1647 dawned, there seemed hope that it might be possible to exploit the growing tensions among the enemies of the Stuarts, despite Charles I’s loss of personal freedom.
*
The Scots had moved swiftly to ensure the security of their prize. Ten days after he handed himself over to their forces at Newark, the king was in Newcastle. He entered the town in the late afternoon of 13 May 1646, with an escort of 300 horsemen, along a road lined with musketeers and pikemen. Royalist propaganda tried to represent this as a regal entry amid widespread rejoicing but the Scots were not inclined to allow any display of popular support. There were no crowds and not even any local dignitaries. The French ambassador told Mazarin that the mayors of Durham and Newcastle were prevented from coming to see the king. He was lodged at Anderson Place, also known as the New House, under the watchful eye of the Scottish commander Alexander Leslie, first earl of Leven.
Leven was not the kind of man the king would have found stimulating company, even if the elderly earl, then in his mid-sixties, had been minded to entertain his charge. He was an illegitimate son of George Leslie, the captain of Blair Castle in Atholl in the Scottish Islands. His education was neglected and he was nearly illiterate but a military career in Europe and especially in the service of the Swedish king, Gustavus Adolphus, had been highly successful. He felt that the role of the Scots in the victory at Marston Moor in 1644 had not received sufficient recognition, galling for a general who had been honoured by the Swedish king. But if Leven, who had a reputation for keeping out of political intrigue, was disgruntled, so were the local population of Newcastle and Northumberland, who had endured the occupation of his army for more than two years. Though his position in the north of England was somewhat eased by the defeat of Montrose’s anti-Covenanter forces at Philiphaugh in September 1645, the king’s surrender at Newark had yet to be turned to positive advantage for Scotland. Meanwhile, Charles needed to be fed, housed and guarded very carefully.
This was a dismal period for the king, among the worst of his life. He was utterly disillusioned, badgered by Henrietta Maria and Mazarin to accept a course that his conscience utterly disavowed and increasingly afraid. Misery sat heavily on him when he arrived in Newcastle. He seemed, it was reported by those who saw him, ‘melancholy and is very grey with cares . . . his Majesty’s face is not shaven but cut round both on the chin and upper lip also. His lock is cut off and his head rounded.’13 The trim beard and carefully combed hair were replaced by a rough, unkempt appearance. The scales fell from his eyes very quickly in Newcastle. ‘It is more than apparent,’ he wrote to Henrietta Maria at the end of May, ‘that the Scots will absolutely hinder my being any more king in England than they have made me in Scotland.’ A few days later he told her that he could not call for any of his old servants nor choose any new ones and that his friends were forbidden by proclamation to see him.14 He would not subscribe to the Covenant or agree to introduce Presbyterianism into England as the state religion. The price the Scots were trying to extract from him in return for their support was too high.
Early on, within three weeks of his arrival in Newcastle, he had made up his mind, though he kept his decision from his captors. He could see only one way out of his plight and so he told his wife that ‘my condition is such that I never expect to see thee, except by the queen’s sending to me persons of secrecy and dexterity, [with whom I might] find means to quit for a time this wretched country. Wherefore, I earnestly desire thee to think of this seriously and speedily, for it will not admit of long delay.’15 It was a refrain he would refer to repeatedly in the coming months, surrounded as he was by ‘fools and knaves, all having a tincture of falsehood’. He felt ‘barbarously baited’, as well he might, since he had to endure lengthy sermons by a Presbyterian preacher with the entirely appropriate name of Mr Cant, who took as one of his texts the seventh verse of Psalm nine: ‘O thou enemy, destructions are come to a perpetual end, and thou hast destroyed cities, their memorial is perished with them.’16 If this were not bad enough, he was compelled to receive deputations of emotional Scottish lords, begging him to submit to the Covenant. After one bruising encounter, he retired, weeping, to his bedchamber. In the middle of May, Jack Ashburnham managed to escape to Holland. Hudson was sent back down to London, leaving the king with only Will Murray as an attendant who he could trust.
Despite the image he portrayed of a forlorn and forsaken king, Charles’s mental state was worse than his physical condition. The New House was not a luxurious palace but it had been prepared to receive its royal visitor. Two members of the Scottish nobility, William Hamilton, Lord Lanark, who acted as the king’s secretary, and Charles Seton, earl of Dunfermline, were part of his little ‘court’ in Newcastle and slept in his bedchamber. Both were young men who would be much involved in attempts to balance the interest of the Scots with the interests of the king and Charles, however desperate he sounded to Henrietta Maria, was already beginning to glimpse how he might play various interests off against one another. But the early summer of 1646 in Newcastle passed slowly. It was not exactly house arrest – there were frequent trips out to play golf and to visit Tynemouth – but life was tedious. He ate well enough, on an allowance of £100 a month, but the feeling that he had lost the mastery of his own fate did not go away. Letters from his wife took a long time to arrive and he worried about the Prince of Wales, convinced that Jersey was not a safe place. Paradoxically, the fall of Oxford at the end of June offered him unexpected respite. More of his adherents found their way north, including his barber, Vincent Babington, who, if the earlier description is accurate, was certainly needed.
Then, on 23 July, the English parliamentary commissioners arrived with propositions for peace. The country was weary of civil war, its citizens demoralized by the loss of life, high taxation, the shattered economy and the hardship brought about by bad harvests. The king had been defeated in battle a year ago and now his headquarters at Oxford had surrendered. It was time to bring matters to an end, especially as cracks were beginning to show in the relationship between the victorious army and the parliament in whose name it had spilt blood. So, at Newcastle, Charles I was offered propositions for ‘a safe and well-grounded peace, agreed upon by the parliaments of both kingdoms respectively’. This settlement would have restored him to the throne but entirely on parliament’s terms. The extent of the defeat that his opponents deemed they had inflicted on him was evident in the stringent terms of the Newcastle propositions. He was to take the oath to the Solemn League and Covenant (and speedily require that it was extended to every one of his subjects in the three kingdoms), give his assent to further acts for the complete abolition of episcopacy and agree to the establishment of Presbyterianism in England. This would, if enacted, have led to a second Reformation in England a little over a century after the first. Swingeing laws were introduced against Catholics, attacking the doctrinal roots of their beliefs and making all who refused the new oath recusants, who would lose control of their children’s religious upbringing. In military matters, Charles was to surrender control of the armed forces to parliament for a period of twenty years with the right to resume it subsequently at times if ‘the safety of the kingdom be concerned’. Punitive measures were stipulated against the king’s supporters, many of whom were excluded from any possibility of pardon or further public employment and were to lose substantial amounts of their lands. The list was headed by Princes Rupert and Maurice and included all the main royalist generals and politicians, in England and Scotland.17
If the commissioners who travelled north to present these peace terms to the king seriously believed he would agree to them, they had greatly mistaken their man. There was nothing at all that Charles would even consider in proposals that so humiliated him and struck at the very foundation of his beliefs. His view of kingship could never embrace such a limited monarchy, in which he would, in his own eyes, be nothing more than a figurehead. But he knew better than to reject outright what was put to him. So began his long game of playing for time. It was something he was good at, though over the next two years he was increasingly exposed as untrustworthy. But why, when he had no respect for his enemies, should he trouble his conscience about his duplicity, even as it became more evident? He was not devoid of intelligence, in both senses of the word. At this point, there was no question of deposing him. Nowhere in the Newcastle propositions was there the faintest hint of republicanism. He knew that there was an increasing rift between the Independents and the Presbyterians and saw that this could be exploited to his advantage. But this was a tactic, not a strategy, because, at root, he had nothing to offer but the vision of kingship which had sustained him since he came to the throne more than twenty years before. The Civil War had hardened, not softened, his commitment to it. So his first reaction was to contain his contempt in public while privately assuring his wife and friends in France that he could never agree to parliament’s demands.
On 1 August he wrote to the Speaker of the House of Lords regarding the propositions he had received for a peace settlement:
[The proposals] do import so great alterations in government both in the Church and kingdom, as it is very difficult to return a particular and positive answer . . . to which end His Majesty desires and proposeth to come to London . . . where by his personal presence he may not only raise a mutual confidence between him and his people, but also have these doubts cleared and these difficulties explained unto him, which he now conceives to be destructive to his regal power, if he should give a full consent to these propositions as they now stand.
He did not leave any doubt that he was greatly concerned by what was laid before him but offered room for manoeuvre. His own demands were, he said, reasonable and ‘very much conducible to that peace which all good men desire and pray for’. At the end, there was even a carrot in the postscript, in which he promised that he would immediately send for the Prince of Wales as soon as ‘a happy agreement’ was reached.18 And with Prince Charles safe in France he could well afford to make such an offer. It had no more chance of becoming a reality than the quiet boy himself had of becoming the husband of his condescending cousin, La Grande Mademoiselle.
*
The English commissioners left Newcastle empty-handed and the stalemate continued. Yet as the parliament at Westminster began to bargain with the Scots for return of the king to their custody, Charles grew more and more desperate to escape England altogether. The autumn of 1646 was a wretched period for him. His refusal to accept Presbyterianism and save his throne, while at the same time appearing to give ground on the control of the army, drove such a wedge between him and his wife that their relationship, made all the more difficult by separation, suffered severe strain. The queen was scathing and incredulous at his obduracy. She still felt that Scotland and Ireland, which she had unrealistic hopes of going to herself, offered him better hopes than the English parliament. But the situation in Ireland had been complicated by the interference of both king and queen, which had undermined the peace efforts of one of the royalists’ most loyal and able supporters, the marquess of Ormonde. Though splits were beginning to appear in Scotland as well, where the marquess of Argyll and the Hamiltons were about to part company in their policy towards Charles I, these could not yet be turned to the king’s advantage. Meanwhile, the queen berated him for the concessions he appeared willing to make in November. She could not believe that he would cede power over the militia to parliament for ten years. This meant, she wrote, that they would never see an end to their troubles: ‘For as long as the Parliament lasts, you are not king; and as for me I shall not again set my foot in England. And with the granting the militia, you have cut your own throat; for having given them this power, you can no longer refuse them anything, not even my life, if they demand it.’19 Charles was distraught at her emotional blackmail; she had, he assured her, been misinformed. At the end of November, he could take no more:
Whatever chiding my willfullness [sic] (as the queen may think), may deserve, for God’s sake leave off threatening me with thy desire to meddle no more with business; and albeit I am confident thou dost not really intend, because I know thou canst not in any kind forsake me (of which this were a sort) or leave to love me, as thou lovest me, give me so much comfort (and God knows I have but little, and that little must come from thee), as to assure me that thou will think no more of any such thing . . . 20
These differences between the king and queen were never fully resolved. She could not understand why he was unable to give way on Presbyterianism and the Covenant, but the king, with considerable justification, saw ‘this damned Covenant’ as ‘the child of rebellion’ which ‘breathes nothing but treason’.21 He would have been still more alarmed if he had known that the queen’s opinions were shared by Cardinal Mazarin. On 12 November 1646, the cardinal wrote to the French ambassador in Scotland, Bellièvre, claiming that he was passionate about the interests of the English king and felt great tenderness towards his person. ‘But,’ he went on, ‘I despair that none of the efforts that are being made to extract him from the unhappiness in which he finds himself are producing any effect.’ He could not understand why Charles would not agree to the establishment of Presbyterianism. He was, he said, equally surprised by the English king’s response to the propositions sent to him at Newcastle. If Charles agreed to this change in religion, he would, in a short time, be more powerful than he had ever been. Bellièvre must continue to press him on this point. ‘If the king of England could see Mazarin’s heart, he would know with what passion he thought continually about his interests, despite all the other great considerations of state that weighed on him.’ He would, he claimed, have no difficulty in giving his own blood to extricate Charles from his difficulties. Meanwhile, there were more urgent considerations, such as keeping the Scots onside. The war with Spain pressed on him and he asked the ambassador to see if he could get 1,000 more Scots to join the effort. But his main concern was to deter Charles from coming to France. There would be nothing that would contribute more to his entire ruin (or put a substantial extra demand on French coffers, though Mazarin did not, of course, say this) and though the cardinal might greatly desire to see His Majesty, this was no reason for Charles to abandon the possibility of his restoration to power. And on that note he ended his masterpiece of diplomatic double-speak.22
Charles I was not convinced by the exhortations of his wife or the chief minister of France. A Dutch ship had been in Newcastle harbour throughout the autumn, ostensibly having its hull repaired. But the stay had another motive. Charles longed to be with his family again. In Holland, he could count on the goodwill of his daughter, Mary, by then living formally with her husband. The House of Orange might facilitate his eventual arrival in France, to be reunited with his queen. The king’s escape was planned for Christmas Day 1646, but it was aborted at the last minute when the behaviour of Will Murray, his servant, attracted attention. This bungled escapade, so typical of the royalists’ inability to make the right decision when it came to Charles’s security, concentrated the minds of the English parliamentarians in their negotiations with the Scots.
The main sticking point had been money. The Scots demanded reparation for the expenses they had incurred, though there was disagreement between the Hamiltons and Argyll about whether the Scottish army should remain in England or return home and what should happen to the king, as well as concern that no peace be concluded without the agreement of the Scots. After considerable bargaining, the English reduced the agreed sum to £400,000, to be paid in instalments.
On 30 January 1647, the first £100,000 was handed over by English commissioners, headed by the earl of Pembroke, the former guardian of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Henry, who had come up to Newcastle in order to collect the king. Outraged royalists accused the Scots of selling Charles I and comparisons were made with Judas. Four days later, the king began his journey south, to Holdenby (pronounced Holmby) House in Northamptonshire, the residence chosen for him by the House of Commons, who had overruled the preference of the Lords for Newmarket, which was thought to be a hotbed of royalism. Charles travelled slowly, with something of the air of a monarch making a royal progress, despite the fact that he was a prisoner. At Ripon in Yorkshire he touched for the King’s Evil – placing his hand on people in an attempt to cure them of the disease which caused an uncomfortable swelling of their lymph nodes – and was greeted by enthusiastic crowds lining the road to Leeds. Outside Nottingham, Fairfax rode out to meet him and kissed his hand. To the parliamentary general – indeed, to all his subjects – he was still their king. Charles told the commissioners accompanying him that the general was a man of honour, a generous but true tribute to someone who had been instrumental in bringing about his own defeat.
As he neared his new residence, the king was heartened by the response he received. The gentry of Northamptonshire came out to meet him in their hundreds; bells were rung and guns fired in Northampton itself and Charles neared Holdenby with cries of ‘God bless Your Majesty’ ringing in his ears. His mood lifted immensely. He was closer to London, to the seat of power that he began to believe might still be his. There was all to play for.