Vanishing Hopes
‘We will not engage our people in another war.’
Charles I, Easter 1647
‘No one rises so high as he who knows not whither he is going.’
Oliver Cromwell, July 1647
The man who, perhaps more than any other, was to influence the course of the lives of the royal children met their father for the first time at the home of Sir John Cutts, Childerley Hall, near Cambridge, on 7 June 1647. Oliver had come far from the East Anglian gentleman farmer of limited means who made his parliamentary debut in 1628. The Civil War had transformed him into a superb soldier and a conviction politician, committed to a concept of liberty fundamentally opposed to the Stuart belief in the divine right of kings. As such, he would become the nemesis of Charles I but neither he nor anyone else could have foreseen such an outcome that summer’s day in 1647, when he accompanied his commander, General Fairfax, to an interview with the king in a country house not far from where he himself had been born. How Charles came to be at the home of the Cutts family is a story in itself.
Charles had found his life and surroundings at Holdenby much more congenial than his dismal time with the Scots in Newcastle. In this large house with its splendid chimneys, originally built for Elizabeth I’s favourite, Christopher Hatton, he kept a small court, was waited upon by the parliamentary commissioners and ate well: ‘All the tables were as well furnished as they used to be when his Majesty was in a peaceful and flourishing state.’1 The king had always been abstemious when it came to food and drink and he attributed his own good health to his diet, exercise and religious devotions. He was not allowed his own Anglican chaplains, despite a formal request in March, but he seems to have found the two divines attached to him far more palatable than the Scottish Presbyterian preachers who harangued him in his former captivity. His days passed in languid gentility, walking in the grounds of Holdenby with Pembroke, at a pace the elderly earl found hard to match, or with Major-General Richard Browne, the Presbyterian army officer assigned to guard him. During these perambulations, everyone else kept a respectful distance as the king engaged in private conversation with his companions. Pembroke fell seriously ill while at Holdenby and his condition was for a while so bad that his son was summoned to his bedside. Charles, ever punctilious in such matters, enquired daily for Pembroke’s health and visited him twice. The earl was touched by his kindness and eventually recovered.
The king was very fond of playing bowls and as there was no bowling green at Holdenby he was allowed to ride over to Harrowden, the home of the Vaux family, or Althorp, Lord Spencer’s house. But the appearance of settled tranquillity in the king’s affairs was misleading. Both he and his captors knew that it was unlikely to last. There was good reason for his prayers and he was well aware that nothing was settled. For England was in ferment and the long-simmering hostility between the army and the Presbyterian members of parliament was threatening to explode. In Scotland meanwhile, the failure to impose Presbyterianism on England made some of the king’s former adversaries rethink their strategy. Perhaps his restoration to the throne was the key to restoring stability in Scotland. Charles saw in these tensions his own salvation. He could play all sides off against one another, seeming to offer sufficient concessions while biding his time. He hoped the time was soon coming when he could be done with the pleasant emptiness of days in the Northamptonshire countryside and return to his God-given rights as ruler. For the king, nothing had changed. The army in England, however, had other ideas.
It was determined not to be disbanded without arrears of pay and on terms that would allow the soldiery to be reintegrated into civilian life. The men who had fought across the killing fields of civil war were now caught up in the wider struggle for political control of England and liberty of conscience. Their stance infuriated parliamentarians like Denzil Holles, who was committed to the destruction of the New Model Army and became its chief opponent in the uncertain spring of 1647. The death of the earl of Essex from a stroke in September 1646 removed one of the most prominent opponents of the Independents from the national scene and Holles, a sour-faced, intemperate Puritan in his late forties who favoured religious unity between England and Scotland and who had always hoped for peace between the king and parliament, stepped into the limelight.2 But despite growing disaffection in the ranks, the soldiers still put their faith in parliament, petitioning it respectfully for what they believed was no more than their due. In late March Holles, in a sparsely attended evening session of the House of Commons, pushed through a response to ‘the petition of the officers and soldiers of the army’, describing its promoters as ‘enemies of the state and disturbers of the public peace’. Though there were Presbyterian supporters in the army, this was too much for the majority of Fairfax’s men. Holles’ Declaration of Dislike, as it became known, united many elements of the army who were offended by their honour being thus impugned and increasingly worried about their future. In May, agitation grew but was firmly resisted by Holles and his supporters in the Commons, who believed they had enough support in the London Trained Bands and the city of London itself to take on the New Model. If it would not back down, they would disband it.
Torn by loyalty to his men and a deep reverence for parliament, Fairfax’s health buckled but by late May he recovered and chaired a council of war at Saffron Walden, at which it was decided to hold a general rendezvous of the army near Newmarket on 4 and 5 June. But before that could happen, intelligence was received that parliament intended to move the king from Holdenby closer to London and restore him under favourable terms that would disadvantage the army and might lead to renewed hostilities. Agitation was growing among the junior officers and rank and file, heading in directions that the generals would find increasingly uncomfortable. Suddenly, securing the king became a priority. It fell to an obscure junior officer, Cornet Joyce, of Fairfax’s own Lifeguards to ensure that this requirement was swiftly met.
George Joyce was twenty-nine years old and had links to the agitators in the army. Very little is known of his background or even his place of birth but by 1644 he was in Cromwell’s horse regiment and in 1647 he was serving Fairfax. The sequence of events which led him to Holdenby is unclear, as is the role of Cromwell in what transpired, even though Joyce was later to claim that he had Cromwell’s authority for the actions he took. What happened to the king was only an indirect consequence of quite different concerns. The army agitators were increasingly well organized into committees and one of these appears to have been alarmed that, in those acrimonious and uncertain times, the army artillery train in Oxford might fall into parliamentary hands. Joyce, with a force of about five hundred men, was despatched to secure it. He was in the process of successfully concluding his mission when he received intelligence from an unknown source in London that parliament was about to order the king’s removal from Holdenby. Seized with the fear that the army was on the verge of being shut out of a peace deal between the king and its opponents in Westminster, Joyce immediately set off for London, to discuss with Cromwell what should be done. The decision reached was to prevent the king’s removal and Joyce sent word to his troops to join him at Holdenby. He got there before them on the afternoon of 2 June, to find the king away at Althorp playing bowls, though Charles returned when told of the cornet’s arrival. Joyce’s men arrived around midnight in good order and were well received by the king’s guards, who fraternized happily with their fellow soldiers, regardless of any religious differences. The next morning, Joyce secured the house. There matters might have rested but circumstances forced George Joyce to take a course that neither he nor Cromwell had foreseen. For in the night the commander of one of the regiments guarding the king, Colonel Graves, who was a supporter of Denzil Holles, had slipped out of Holdenby and was believed to be riding to London to get help. Faced with the possibility of an armed confrontation, Joyce needed to act. It would not be prudent to stay and now he had control of the king, he was resolved to keep it. Probably neither he nor Cromwell had intended to abduct Charles I. With hindsight, it is easy to say that they might have thought through the implications of their actions and seen this as a possible outcome. The army was struggling to remain true to its own conception of the causes for which the Civil War had been fought and did not need further complications. Cromwell claimed passionately afterwards that it was never his intention that the army should assume custody of the king. Yet that is indeed what happened.
Joyce consulted with his men before taking such a momentous step. And they were unanimously of the opinion that the king must be moved. It then became necessary for the cornet to apprise Charles of this necessity. He only gained access to the royal person with some difficulty, having been magnificently patronized by the parliamentary commissioners and the king’s servants, who did not consider such a lowly officer an appropriate person to enter his majesty’s bedchamber. The news that he must leave early the next morning was not, at first, well received by the king. He had been comfortable at Holdenby and feared for his personal safety. Joyce was polite and reassuring. He assured Charles that no harm would come to him, that he would be treated with respect by the army, not forced to do anything against his conscience, and that he could keep his servants. Thus mollified, the monarch slept.
He still had his doubts, however, as preparations for his departure were made at 6 a.m. on 4 June. Who, he wondered, had given Joyce his orders? Where was his commission? Joyce told him: ‘Here is my commission.’ Charles was puzzled. ‘Where?’ he asked, seeing no document. To which George Joyce, pointing to the soldiers, famously replied: ‘Behind me.’ Charles smiled, appreciating the honesty. ‘It is as fair a commission and as well written as I have seen a commission written in my life: a company of handsome proper gentleman as I have seen a great while.’3 But what, he asked, if he refused to go with them? Would they force him? Joyce, who must, by now, have been getting anxious, replied that they humbly entreated the king to accompany them. Naturally, Charles wanted to know where he was going. The actual destination does not seem to have been given much thought: Joyce suggested Oxford or Cambridge but Charles had spent long enough in the former and Newmarket appealed to him more than the latter because its air agreed with him. Perhaps he thought that it was still full of royalist sympathizers. In fact, it would very shortly be full of disgruntled soldiers, headed by their beloved general Fairfax, who was initially so appalled by the manner in which the king had passed into the army’s hands that he threatened to court-martial George Joyce.
Joyce’s seizure of the king sent shock waves through the English Presbyterians and their Scottish allies. Overnight, they were put on the back foot. One of their first moves in response was to send a mission to France to try to persuade Henrietta Maria to send Prince Charles to Scotland, where he could lead an invasion into England. But many months were to pass before the Prince of Wales left his mother and then it would not be to command a Scottish army but an English fleet. His father, meanwhile, was surprisingly sanguine. The bitter dispute between parliament and the army merely confirmed Charles I’s view that the divisions among his enemies would undo them. Being the army’s prisoner was no worse than confinement by Presbyterians; indeed, it might even offer better long-term prospects. He was treated very civilly and by 25 June, when he was residing at Hatfield House, home of the earl of Salisbury, his chaplains were restored to him and he was permitted to use the Anglican prayer book. His spirits rose even more when, in mid-July, he was reunited with James, Elizabeth and Henry, the three of his children who remained in England.
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They had been staying at Hampton Court with the earl of Northumberland when their father was taken to Newmarket. Immediately, parliament ordered their return to St James’s, fearful that they, too, would fall into the hands of the army. Northumberland protested that the palace was not prepared to receive them but accepted that the order must be obeyed without delay. The king hoped to see his children when he was brought to Windsor, having previously petitioned parliament that they might be allowed to join him there at the end of June, but when he arrived at the castle he found that his request had been denied. Desperately disappointed, he returned to his latest temporary residence, the manor house in Caversham, Berkshire, formerly owned by the royalist earl of Craven. There he enlisted Fairfax’s help, and on 4 July he was able to write with some assurance to his second son: ‘James, I am in hope that you may be permitted, with your brother and sister, to come to some place betwixt this and London, where I might see you.’ He suggested that his son ask parliament for leave to make a journey for a couple of nights’ stay but was aware that this could prove problematic:
But rather than not see you I will be content that you come to some convenient place to dine, and go back again at night. And foreseeing the fear of your being brought within the power of the Army as I am may be objected, to hinder this my desire, I have full assurance from Sir Thomas Fairfax and the chief officers that there will be no interruption or impediment made by them for your return now and when you please. So God bless you. Your loving father, Charles R.
He added a postscript: ‘Send me word as soon as you can of the time and place where I shall have the contentment of seeing you, your brother and sister.’4
His confidence in Fairfax was rewarded. The general wrote to the earl of Manchester, speaker of the House of Lords:
My Lord, I was sent unto by the King on Friday last, to desire the parliament to give way to him to see his children, and that they might for that purpose be sent to him. If I may be so bold to offer my opinion, I think the allowance of such a thing may be without the least prejudice to the kingdom, and yet gain more upon His Majesty than denying it. And if it be the prayer of every good man, that his heart may be gained, the performance of such civilities to him is very suitable to those desires and will hear well with all men, who (if they can imagine it to be their own case) cannot but be sorry if His Majesty’s natural affections to his children in so small a thing should not be complied with. And if any question should be concerning the assurance of their return, I shall engage for their return within what time the parliament shall limit.
This appeal to common humanity could not, however, be entirely divorced from the power struggle in which the fate of the entire royal family, and not just the king, was entwined. Fairfax went on to deny vehemently that he and the officers of the army were engaged ‘upon some underhand contract or bargain with the King’ which, he said, slandered their integrities and was intended to lead to a ‘misunderstanding betwixt the Parliament and their Army’. After several paragraphs of closely argued justification of the army and its position, he returned to the treatment of the royal family itself:
In general, we humbly conceive that to avoid all harshness and afford all kind usage to His Majesty’s person, a thing consistent with the peace and safety of the kingdom, is the most Christian, honourable and prudent way . . . we think that tender, equitable and moderate dealing, both towards His Majesty, his royal family and his late party (so far as may stand with safety to the kingdom and security to our common rights and liberties) is the most hopeful course to take away the seeds of war, or future feuds amongst us for posterity, and to procure a lasting peace and agreement in this now distracted nation.5
The letter was an eloquent mix of common sense and justification of the army’s position. Allied with a request from the duke of York that he and his siblings might see their father, it produced the desired effect for the royal family, though the Commons only agreed reluctantly to the request. Sadly Fairfax’s wider arguments, pleading for unity in dealing with the problems of the kingdom, were not to be realized. For the present, the king was relieved and delighted that he would, at last, see his younger children again.
The children left St James’s Palace early in the morning of 16 July in an atmosphere of high excitement. Their party of three coaches was attended by a guard of city militia, ostensibly for their protection, though the reception as they travelled west into Berkshire was one of general acclamation. The royal children were rarely seen in public and sympathy for them was widespread. As the coach carrying Elizabeth, her two brothers and the earl of Northumberland passed through the small towns and villages of the area there were cries of greeting from the crowds lining the flower-strewn streets. But anticipation had got the better of them and they found when they arrived at the Greyhound Inn at Maidenhead, the appointed meeting place, that they were there an hour too early. Since etiquette would have dictated that the king should not arrive first it was a reasonable delay.
The reunion was a touching one. So much had changed in the years since Charles I had last seen Elizabeth and Henry that the king was deeply moved. He found his daughter a serious, pale girl on the cusp of womanhood, not beautiful but certainly gracious, with the dignity of bearing that accompanied one raised as a princess, even in the midst of civil war. Northumberland knew his obligations to the royal children and, whatever his personal politics, he had made every effort to ensure that they were treated as befitted their station in life. In Elizabeth’s face the king saw both the marks of her keen intelligence and the strain of the ill health that had dogged her from her earliest childhood. James had grown over the period since his father abandoned him at Oxford but though he was now a handsome and healthy lad of fourteen he still clung to his father’s side, perhaps wondering how long they would be together this time. But to the little duke of Gloucester, Prince Henry, known in the family as Harry, this slightly unkempt and sad-faced man to whom everyone bent the knee was a complete stranger. ‘Do you know me, child?’ asked Charles I, to which Harry, with perhaps more honesty than tact answered, quite simply, ‘No.’ The king is said to have replied: ‘I am your father, child; and it is not one of the least of my misfortunes that I have brought you and your brothers and sisters into the world to share my miseries.’ This sober reflection caused James and Elizabeth to cry and Charles realized the need for raising their mood. Tradition has it that he took Henry on his knee. There may be an element of Victorian whimsy in this account but though Charles never forgot his regality there can be no doubting his affection for his family or his pleasure in being with them again.
As the morning progressed, two gentlemen unknown to the children entered the room in the Greyhound Inn which had been set aside for the royal family. One was Sir Thomas Fairfax, who was amused and touched by being singled out by Princess Elizabeth for gratitude, ‘for the high happiness she now enjoyed in the sight of her dear father, which she knew was obtained only by his industry and management’. She went on to say that she would always be grateful to him and, that if it were ever in her power (a sweet but forlorn hope), that she would happily requite the favour. Charmed by her manner, Fairfax asked permission to kiss her hand.6 She had been a pawn in a complex struggle for the last five years and the manners of this man of high integrity, torn between loyalty to the soldiers he led and obedience to a monarch who still commanded his personal respect, left a profound impression on her.
Similarly impressed by this scene of gentle happiness was another family man. He had lost a son in the Civil War and knew the pain and uncertainty of partings that could be prolonged by fighting and rendered permanent by death. The scene he observed so affected him that he told Sir John Berkeley, with tears in his eyes, that he had witnessed ‘the tenderest sight that ever his eyes beheld’. So moved was Oliver Cromwell by the reunion of Charles and his children that his opinion of the king was highly favourable. He called Charles ‘the uprightest and most conscientious man of his three kingdoms’, saying ‘the Independents were under infinite obligations to him for having rejected the Scots’ propositions at Newcastle, which his Majesty’s interest seemed to invite him to’ and he ‘concluded . . . by wishing that God would be pleased to look upon him according to the sincerity of his heart towards his Majesty.’7
The children were allowed to spend a couple of days with their father at Caversham Manor before being taken back to London. It was a tearful parting but there was optimism that they would soon be in one another’s company again. Fairfax, Cromwell and Northumberland all knew that the dispute between the army and the Presbyterians in parliament must soon reach tipping point, with agitation growing in the ranks as the so-called Leveller movement gained publicity and confidence. Tensions in London were running high and the outcome there looked uncertain unless the army moved to contain the situation. Charles I was well aware of these currents which washed around the personal pleasures of his improved family situation. On the very day that he was reunited with Elizabeth, James and Henry, a general council of the army convened at Reading. Its ostensible purpose was to decide whether the army should move immediately against its opponents in parliament and the city but it had a deeper underlying purpose, one that had involved collaboration between leaders of the army and sympathetic members of both Houses of Parliament. Anxious to avoid further war and to close up the dangerous divisions which were appearing in society, the time was believed to be ripe for offering a peace settlement to the king on realistic terms which he could accept comfortably. It was Charles’s tragedy, and indeed that of the three kingdoms as a whole, that his corrosive belief that he could always do better by prevaricating and sowing dissension outweighed his ability to compromise. All the time that he was seeing his children at frequent intervals throughout this turbulent summer of 1647, while he rejoiced in their company and their evident happiness in being with him again, he was refusing to engage with the best prospect for peace and protection of his monarchy that he was ever given.
It was an offer that originated not with the dry Presbyterianism of the Scots or the furious Denzil Holles but the more open approach of the army’s leaders – Cromwell, his son-in-law, Henry Ireton, and parliamentary grandees like Northumberland and Wharton, who had long looked for a constitutional settlement with the king and hoped, at last, that he would see sense. The king’s inability to respond would lead, ultimately, to desperation and to a further parting from the children with whom he had passed a sometimes idyllic interlude in the great houses of Syon and Hampton Court, on the banks of the Thames. In late July the terms of a settlement were drafted under the somewhat prosaic title of The Heads of the Proposals. Essentially, they suggested a period of transition into a more limited monarchy, allowing the king to retain control of the armed forces and appointment of his own advisers for longer than had been proposed in previous discussions, as well as permitting the survival of episcopacy, albeit with restricted powers, and the continued use of the prayer book. The document also called for biennial parliaments (something which might give modern British politicians food for thought) and allowed for the right of religious assembly outside the national Church, an important step towards the extension of religious toleration. The Heads were convincingly argued, clearly presented and combined a workable approach with a reasonable degree of compromise and even generosity towards royalist opponents. Charles I was presented with what many of those who had opposed him believed to be a just and workable solution which would ensure the ‘rights and liberties of the kingdom and the settling [of ] a just and lasting peace’.8
Yet Charles never took The Heads of the Proposals seriously. His refusal to do so is partly explained by the nature of the man and his own, unshakeable interpretation of the duties and responsibilities of kingship, but also reflects the ferment of the times. The king knew very well that there was bitter hostility between the Presbyterians in parliament and the army and that there was a possibility of counter-revolution in London. Though advised by Sir John Berkeley to accept the army’s terms, others urged him to prevaricate. This bad counsel chimed with the king’s own inclinations. He still believed that he could obtain better terms or even that he might not have to compromise at all. His supporters in Scotland were proffering blandishments that they would fight for the Crown again and from Ireland came hopes that forces loyal to him on the island, where there was resentment of parliament’s unsubtle approach, might regroup around Ormonde. Charles never lost sight of the fact that he was a ruler of three kingdoms and he clung still to the belief that this was the key to eventual victory over his enemies in England. When Ireton and other leading army officers came to see him to discuss The Heads of the Proposals they found, despite agreeing to further concessions during the course of intense discussions lasting several hours, that he was unwilling to commit. ‘You cannot be without me,’ he told them. ‘You will fall to ruin if I do not sustain you.’9 But this was a gross overstatement of his position. Ireton and Cromwell were frustrated and disappointed by the king’s attitude but he did not make any genuine moves to change his approach even after the defiance of the London mob fizzled out and the army occupied the capital on 3 August.
During the autumn Charles’s belief that the army would not be the means of restoring him to his throne on acceptable terms was hardened by the information he received on further splits between its leading officers and the more junior soldiers. Though the content of the Putney Debates, which took place in late October and November, was not known to him in detail, he was aware from royalists in the Tower, imprisoned with the Leveller agitator John Lilburne, that opinion in the rank and file of the army was hardening against him and that some were referring to him in biblical terms as ‘a man of blood’. The fear of assassination returned. It was certainly a factor, though not necessarily the major one, in the conviction gaining on the king daily, even as Cromwell listened with extreme discomfiture to the revolutionary ideas being aired in Putney Church, that he must attempt a further escape from confinement.
There are questions that have never been entirely answered surrounding Charles I’s escape from Hampton Court on the night of 11 November 1647 but one thing is certain: it was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. Elizabeth and her brothers had been staying with him, in this great palace which must have brought back memories of the happiness of her early childhood, until just a few days before he fled. The king was carefully, if respectfully, guarded but Elizabeth complained to her father that the sound of the soldiers walking up and down in the long gallery, just outside her bedchamber, disturbed her sleep. Concerned for her delicate health, Charles summoned Colonel Whalley, the officer in charge of the guards at Hampton Court, and asked that the men on duty be quieter. Whalley assured the king that he would give orders for the guards to exercise restraint but the matter did not rest there, since Elizabeth reported that she could still hear the soldiers’ footfall. In a second interview, Whalley expressed frustration but he was willing to order that the men be removed to a greater distance ‘provided his majesty would be graciously pleased to renew his engagement not to attempt to escape’. The king bridled at the inference that he might use Elizabeth’s sleeping difficulties to his own advantage, saying: ‘You had my engagement. I will not renew it. Keep your guards.’10 But whether it had occurred to him, even subconsciously, that a reduction of the guard near his own chamber, which also opened off the long gallery, would help the plans that he was forming we shall never know. The royal children returned to St James’s and their official guardian, Northumberland, within a few days of this exchange. The duke of York never saw his father again.
The night of 11 November was wet and windy. The king retired early, as was his custom on a Thursday, to write letters to Henrietta Maria and to Princess Mary in Holland. Just the previous day, parliament had agreed a new set of peace proposals to be put before him, but he did not wait to peruse them. The Scottish commissioners who had seen him earlier that week were already aware of his intention to escape. He talked first of all about going north to Berwick but this may have been mentioned simply because he felt it was a destination that would appeal to his visitors. In fact, when he slipped out of an unguarded rear entrance from his rooms that led to the gardens and a boat waiting to take him across the river, he seems to have had no clear idea of where he was heading. The gentlemen who were waiting for him on the opposite bank of the Thames gave him conflicting advice as the party rode hell for leather to the west of London and into Hampshire. Sir John Berkeley favoured taking a boat to France, though Charles’s initial inclination seems to have been to make for Jersey. Jack Ashburnham, who had been involved in the disastrous escape to the Scots eighteen months earlier, pondered the possibility of riding into London to appeal directly to its inhabitants, a gesture as dramatic as it was impractical. His other suggestion, made while Charles rested at Titchfield House, the home of the earl of Southampton, was to make for the Isle of Wight, where the newly appointed governor, Colonel Robert Hammond, was believed to have royalist sympathies. It proved to be a fatal error of judgement.
Hammond, like many others in the Civil War, came from a family of conflicted loyalties. He had served the earl of Essex with distinction but was not himself a Presbyterian. One of his uncles was a lieutenant-general of artillery in the New Model Army; another was a chaplain to the king. It was through this prominent Anglican that the younger Hammond had been introduced to Charles I. Yet though he was impressed by Charles personally, Hammond was no royalist. His wife was a daughter of John Hampden, cousin to Oliver Cromwell, and a staunch parliamentarian who had died early in the Civil War. The young colonel was committed to the army’s resistance to parliament but became troubled by the radicalization of the rank and file. Aware of Hammond’s discomfiture, Cromwell suggested to Fairfax that an appointment as governor of the Isle of Wight would be an appropriate solution. He had only been in the post a couple of months when Jack Ashburnham unexpectedly arrived on the island to inform him that the king was at Titchfield.
The news was a thunderbolt to Hammond. Greatly perturbed, he exclaimed: ‘You have undone me by bringing the king into the island.’ How could he square the obligation of protecting the king on the one hand with the duty he had to the army and parliament? Though Charles was still on the mainland both king and colonel realized that there was no comfortable way out of this dilemma. Writing many years later, Clarendon claimed that the monarch was equally appalled by Ashburnham’s initiative in revealing his presence and that his response echoed Hammond’s: ‘Oh, Jack, thou hast undone me.’11 But the die was cast and Charles spent the next thirteen months in a new captivity, in the draughty and far from luxurious Carisbrooke Castle, as the consequences of his escape from Hampton Court were played out across his kingdoms and in the wider European sphere. On 26 December he pinned his hopes on a new, secret agreement with the Scots, known as the Engagement. They would invade England to restore him, though he gave little enough away to them in return. As royalist sentiment fed rising discontent in England, the threat of renewed civil war loomed in the spring of 1648. It would have profound implications for the children of Charles I.
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The Engagement had been signed under the noses of parliamentary commissioners who were trying to agree their own deal with the king over Christmas 1647. This approach he rejected on 28 December, much to the chagrin of the House of Commons. Feeling against him rose and, for the first time, was couched in disrespectful language. Clarendon wrote that ‘Every man’s mouth was opened against him with the utmost sauciness and licence.’ Cromwell was not the only person whose views, so positive back in the summer, underwent a sea change. A few days into the New Year of 1648, the Commons agreed that no further approaches should be made to the king and this vote became official parliamentary policy, as the Vote of No Addresses, on 11 February. Consideration was now being given to forcing the king to abdicate, though not, it should be made clear, to the abolition of monarchy. Two of the king’s sons remained in England and while it might be deemed necessary to depose Charles I and disinherit his eldest son, an exile in France, the fourteen-year-old duke of York was seriously proposed as a replacement. During his minority, a limited monarchy would be developed and the young king educated in his new role. James, however, had other ideas.
Though we cannot be certain, he had probably known of his father’s plans to escape from Hampton Court. The news of Charles I’s flight, when it came, is unlikely to have been a surprise to James, and perhaps not to Elizabeth either. Both had been in secret correspondence with their father and passed a good deal of time in his company. In the first months of 1648, as Charles tried unsuccessfully to get away from the Isle of Wight, leading to the conditions of his stay there becoming a harsher captivity than he had thus far experienced, James also attempted to flee from Northumberland’s custody, as he had been urged by his father. For the earl of Northumberland, increasingly troubled by the responsibility of being governor to James, Elizabeth and Henry and personally disillusioned by divisions among the king’s opponents, James was something of a nightmare charge. He was arrogant, hot-tempered and unreliable, even threatening, on one occasion, to fire an arrow from a longbow at a servant who had reprimanded him for an outburst when he learned of Charles I’s imprisonment on the Isle of Wight. After he was discovered to be in secret correspondence with the king, James was threatened with a spell in the Tower of London, a prospect which seems to have unnerved him into giving his word of honour that he would not try to get away again. It was an undertaking that he did not keep.
On the chilly spring evening of 20 April, James finally fled the custody of the earl of Northumberland. It was a carefully organized and executed escape, one that had been played out under the eyes of his governor who, though not exactly colluding in what was going on, seems to have deliberately overlooked its implications. He had already told parliament that he could not guarantee the safety of the royal children. The plot involved Princess Elizabeth, who was certainly aware of her brother’s intentions, little Prince Harry, who was not, and a pair of lovers who represented both the romance and tawdriness of the royalist cause. For James’s liberator, Colonel Joseph Bampfield, was an unprincipled rogue, who became, like others in those turbulent times, a double agent, and his mistress, Anne Murray (later Lady Halkett), a remarkable and highly articulate woman.12 Anne recorded her dramatic life in an entertaining and revealing autobiography. Together, they engineered the flight of the second in line to the throne.
In her memoirs, Anne Murray states that the king’s desire that Bampfield should actively organize his son’s escape was communicated to the duke of York by ‘a gentleman attending His Highness, who was full of honour and fidelity, by his means he had private access to the duke, to whom he presented the king’s letter and order to His Highness for consenting to act what CB [Colonel Bampfield] should contrive for his escape.’13 Charles I knew and trusted the colonel, who, by his own admission, had been in regular communication with the king since he arrived on the Isle of Wight. ‘I had,’ Bampfield later wrote, ‘found out means of correspondence with him and of giving his majesty constant advertisements of all occurrences which concerned him.’14 Confident in the colonel’s reliability, Charles authorized him to find a means of getting the duke of York away from England: ‘I am advertised,’ he wrote in January 1648, ‘that it has been deliberated by some of the army to possess themselves of the duke of York. Consider if you cannot find ways to convey him out of England.’ At the end of the following month, he reiterated this command, saying: ‘I approve what you have already done and what you propose for the saving of the duke of York . . . bring him, if possible, to his mother or sister.’15
The involvement of someone who had the king’s confidence was sufficient recommendation to a suggestible boy, thoroughly indignant at his father’s treatment and eager to do anything he could to help the royalist cause. James was very like his parents in refusing to recognize any differences of degree among their opponents. Those who were not unequivocally for them were simply against them. And Bampfield, who was evidently highly plausible, was able to overcome the boy’s initial scruples about breaking his word. He assured James that, as a minor, he could not be held to such oaths. His conscience assuaged, the young duke went along with Bampfield’s plans wholeheartedly but with commendable caution. They were not to be put into action with any precipitation, but carefully rehearsed for some weeks in advance.
Each evening, for the space of an hour or more, the royal children played hide and seek in the house and grounds of St James’s Palace, after the earl of Northumberland had paid them his regular visit. James might have been thought rather old for such pursuits but they could easily be explained by the participation of his brother, who clearly enjoyed the game, and of Northumberland’s own children. Elizabeth, however, knew that the intention was not an innocent one. Often James would secrete himself in such difficult hiding places that it took at least half an hour to find him and sometimes he could not be found at all and came out triumphantly, of his own accord. On the evening of 20–21 April, the game began as usual, after James had spent some time talking to his sister, in the company of her servants. It was important for everything to appear as normal and Elizabeth, who well knew that her brother planned a permanent disappearance that night, seems to have kept her nerve with remarkable aplomb. The endurance of her situation and a gentle nature had earned her the nickname ‘Temperance’ but she was a girl of steel on this occasion, fighting conflicting emotions. She had greatly enjoyed her elder brother’s company during the two years they had spent together after the fall of Oxford and, for this reason alone, she was sorry to see him go. But she was a Stuart princess and she perfectly understood that his escape was vital to her father’s cause. It would have crossed her mind, as they chatted, that she might never see him again, yet despite her delicate health, and the uncertainties surrounding the king’s future, she was full of hope that the parting would be temporary.
When James bade his sister goodnight, he went back to his room, locking in her little dog, who followed him everywhere. Then he started off down the back stairs, only to return in a hurry to his room and pretend to read, when he caught his foot noisily on the descent. Once he was convinced that his clumsiness had failed to attract attention, he crept down again and went out via the inner garden of St James’s Palace into St James’s Park itself, triple locking all the doors behind him. He had obtained a key from the gardener, claiming that his own was not working. Bampfield was waiting for James at the garden gate with a cloak and periwig, designed to make him appear like any young nobleman, swiftly whisking him away by coach and then along the river by boat to a safe house near London Bridge, where Anne Murray was ready with the prince’s disguise.
The idea was for James to be dressed in women’s clothes (in contrast to his little sister Henrietta, who had fled the country in boy’s apparel) but Anne had not found procuring something suitable an entirely straightforward task. The tailor to whom she presented the order for a mohair outfit, enough to make a petticoat and waistcoat for a young gentlewoman, was amazed by the measurements he was given: ‘He considered it a long time and said he had made many such gowns and suits, but he had never made any to such a person in his life. I thought he was in the right; but his meaning was, he had never seen any woman of so low a stature have so big a waist. However, he made it as exactly fit as if he had taken the measure himself. It was a mixed mohair of a light hair colour and black, and the under petticoat was scarlet.’ The measurements of this curious garment suggest that James was not so tall as his elder brother but he was certainly eager to try it on, calling, ‘Quickly, quickly, dress me.’ Anne Murray, who was greatly relieved by his arrival just as she was starting to think he must have been apprehended, reported that ‘He looked very pretty in it.’ A barge took the duke of York downriver. It was a slow and difficult journey against the wind and James grew anxious. He was desperate not to return but, in an impulsive action that might be put down to an adolescent not being able to remember his part, but was typical of the injudicious man he became, he gave himself away. The garters on his stockings needed adjustment and his indecorous way of hitching up his hose attracted the attention of the bargemaster. It then became necessary for Bampfield to take this man into their confidence and to persuade him to dim the lights of the barge as it passed the blockhouse at Gravesend. This manoeuvre having been successfully undertaken, James, duke of York, boarded a Dutch vessel and slipped out of the country. By the morning of 23 April 1648, he was at Flushing and spent the night at Middelburg.
When Princess Mary heard of her brother’s arrival she was overjoyed. Tailors were ordered to provide new clothes for James, since he had left England with only Anne Murray’s bizarre mohair outfit. From the town of Dort, James was transported in his brother-in-law’s own yacht to Hounslerdyke, where William of Orange came to greet him in person. They had not seen each other since the summer of 1641, when Charles I had sought to distract London from Strafford’s trial by the marriage of his eldest daughter into the Dutch House of Orange. The little brother Mary remembered had changed into a good-looking young man and she was delighted to see him again. ‘So great was Mary’s impatience that she ran down to the street door of her palace [in The Hague] and regardless of the presence of bystanders, embraced her brother with passionate tenderness.’16
Some hours passed at St James’s before there was certainty that James had, indeed, fled. The earl of Northumberland duly informed both Houses of Parliament and a watch was put, much too late, on all roads out of London and on the Cinque Ports. After an inquiry, the earl was cleared of any dereliction of duty and was asked to continue as governor to Henry and Elizabeth, a charge he accepted but with the proviso that he could not be held responsible for their security. The servants of the children were, once again, changed, and Elizabeth and Henry were sent to Syon House, where their education continued, a welcome distraction for Elizabeth from the loneliness brought about by James’s absence. Meanwhile, as insurrection broke out in England and the threat of Scottish invasion became a reality during the summer of 1648, the princess’s two elder brothers, both now safely out of their father’s kingdom, prepared to help fight for his restoration during the confused period of the Second Civil War.