‘That man of blood’
‘I had rather you should be Charles le bon, than le grand, good rather than great.’
The England that Prince James left behind as his Dutch vessel slipped out into the North Sea was a disturbed and dismal country. The unseasonably cold spring turned into a miserably wet summer with weather more reminiscent of February and sunshine in short supply. Roads became quagmires and crops were drowned in the mud, adding to the scarcity of food which a poor harvest of 1647 had already worsened. It is hardly surprising that, in these trying circumstances, unrest grew. Many citizens felt aggrieved by a war that had seemed to be over two years ago but had solved nothing. There was no structured peace and tensions between the army and parliament remained, despite a reduction in the overall number of soldiers. Taxes, particularly excise, were high and much resented, as were the county committees who were required to implement Westminster’s decisions. Many people did not like the religious settlement embodied in the Directory of Worship or the suppression of the celebration of Christmas (something that is often viewed as a Cromwellian invention but, in fact, was introduced by the Presbyterian majority in parliament) and there were disturbances in several cities, including London and Canterbury.1 The theatres, closed by parliament before the Civil Wars even began, briefly reopened in the New Year only to be faced with a renewed ban and an order that playhouses be demolished. Actors who defied this ordinance were threatened with public flogging. Blasphemy became a capital offence, even before the Westminster Assembly’s version of orthodox doctrine was actually published.
Nor was the situation much happier in Scotland. The Engagement split the nobility and the parliament and was denounced by the Kirk. Women in Edinburgh took to the streets declaiming that their husbands would not go to war on behalf of Charles Stuart while many royalists and the so-called ‘reformadoes’, cashiered officers from the royalist army, went north to Scotland to take up the king’s cause. There was even hope of Irish involvement on the king’s side.
When news of the duke of York’s successful escape was brought to the exiles in Paris, spirits rose. Henrietta Maria’s entourage there remained short of money and quarrelsome, its communications with Charles I more difficult since he was incarcerated on the Isle of Wight, but the Scottish situation and James’s freedom gave grounds for hope. The French court itself began 1648 with a sigh of relief. Towards the end of the previous year Louis XIV, then aged nine, had contracted smallpox, to the consternation of his mother and his officials. While his younger brother, Philippe, was sent out of Paris for his own safety, Louis, who was a robust child, survived both the disease and the attentions of the medical staff, who bled him and used all sorts of bizarre herbal remedies to get the high fever to break. Anne of Austria seldom left his bedside during the two weeks he was most seriously ill and Mazarin visited daily. As the child improved, he received from the cardinal the gift of an English horse. Louis insisted on seeing the animal as soon as he heard about it, and the horse was actually led upstairs into his bedroom. By 12 January 1648, the young king of France was well enough to attend a service of thanksgiving for his recovery in Notre Dame. The Gazette de France, the official news-sheet of the government, echoed the sentiments of the country as a whole when it wrote: ‘Thus we see how well God loves France, contenting Himself, as He does, with merely showing her the rods of punishment with which He beats others.’2 This could have been an oblique reference to the untimely death of the heir to the Spanish throne, a hint of smugness as war between the two countries dragged on, but it could equally have applied to the disasters that had befallen the Stuarts across the Channel. Both Anne of Austria and Henrietta Maria had cause for hope in the spring of 1648 and both were to be confounded. The last act of the Civil War was not yet played out in England and a long period of unrest and rebellion was about to convulse France.
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As momentum appeared once again to be swinging back to Charles I, the king himself was little more than a spectator. The Engagement had revived his cause, but his own liberty, in contrast to that of his second son, was more distant than ever. The Isle of Wight was a tiny domain and Charles was eager to get away from it. He could not suborn Hammond, but he could and did find others in Carisbrooke and outside it who were willing to help him. On the mainland, Ashburnham based himself at Netley House in Hampshire, which belonged to the Prince of Wales’s former governor, the marquess of Hertford, and continued to work on schemes for escape. The assistant laundress at Carisbrooke, Mary, was used for a while as a courier for letters hidden under the edge of the carpet in the king’s rooms but was soon found out and dismissed. Charles also received visits from the royalist spy and smuggler Jane Whorwood, the resourceful, red-headed, pock-marked sister-in-law of the earl of Lanark, who may have briefly been the king’s mistress in the summer of 1648. The precise nature of their relationship remains open to interpretation because of the enciphered correspondence that survives. On the face of it, Charles I is not at all the sort of man one would think of as an adulterer but his letters to Jane, which refer to smothering her with kisses and embraces, coupled with the fact that she certainly seems to have passed two evenings alone in his company, suggest otherwise. He and Henrietta Maria had been apart since 1644 and the king evidently missed female companionship as well, perhaps, as the physical side of his marriage.
Charles tried to get away several times but Hammond was well aware of his intentions. There was an element of farce in the desperation of the king to escape. His first attempt, in March 1648, was foiled because he got stuck in the window from which he was supposed to lower himself. Yet during the spring and summer of 1648, as insurrections broke out in several parts of England, the Scots invaded and the parliamentary fleet mutinied, Charles and his family had reason to believe that his captivity might soon be over.
It was in the west of Wales that discontent first turned to outright insurgency. This part of the principality had a long history, over many centuries, of opposing central authority. Henry Tudor landed here in 1485 to launch his campaign against Richard III so it was perhaps fitting that Pembroke Castle, where the first Tudor monarch was born, should have become the focus of an uprising, led by dissident soldiers, in support of the king and ‘the privileges of parliament, the laws of the land and liberties of the people’. The task of subduing the uprising by force fell to Cromwell but not before he had joined a three-day prayer meeting at Windsor at which the leaders of the army wrestled with the notion that God had withdrawn His favour from them because they had sought peace with the king. Such soul-searching provokes incredulity and charges of hypocrisy from our secular age but this is to misunderstand the seventeenth-century mind. For these godly men the withdrawal of divine approval was the most serious check to their consciences that they could imagine and they would not make decisions that involved further bloodshed without a period of sober reflection and prayer. The news that a much-liked officer, Fairfax’s adjutant-general, Christopher Fleming, had been killed in Wales, concentrated their minds. They determined that ‘if ever the Lord brought us back again in peace, to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an account for the blood he had shed, and mischief he had done to his utmost, against the Lord’s cause and people in these poor nations.’3 It was not the first time that this biblical imagery had been used to describe the king (it had first surfaced in the Putney Debates six months earlier) but the renewed outbreak of fighting in his exhausted kingdoms was now laid squarely on the shoulders of a king who had consistently failed to agree terms. It is highly unlikely, however, that any of the officers present was envisaging a trial that would lead to the king’s death. They lived in an uncertain present, aware of what was unfolding around them but without the benefit of hindsight that still colours much of the general perception of historical events. And, despite their concern for the unnecessary shedding of blood, they were not, as time would show, of one mind, faced as they were by the twin challenges of popular unrest and resurgent Leveller activity in the army.
The unrest that disgruntled soldiers had unleashed in South Wales was infectious. The south-east of England also rose in revolt in the spring of 1648. In mid-May a petition from Surrey, calling for a treaty with the king and the disbandment of the army, was presented by 3,000 armed men at Westminster, whose violent fury was only contained by two regiments guarding parliament. A series of uprisings in Kentish towns followed but petered out when Fairfax himself went into the county. Far more serious was the mutiny of the parliamentary fleet in the Downs, the anchorage area for shipping off the east Kent coast between Dover and the Thames estuary, where most of the warships declared for the king. This unexpected turn of fortune, triggered by the appointment of the radical Thomas Rainsborough as vice-admiral, suddenly thrust the queen and the Prince of Wales back into the limelight.4 Since the king was not in a position to appoint an overall commander who could unite the various groups now growing in size and zeal in support of royalism, it fell to Henrietta Maria and her son at the Louvre in Paris to take the lead. The earl of Holland, a man who had already changed sides twice during the Civil War, was not the most intelligent of choices to command the king’s forces in England but as disaffection at county level spread in June to Essex, the West Country and also North Wales and parts of the West Midlands, Fairfax and Cromwell’s men faced a series of revolts that threatened to spread their forces uncomfortably thin. For the Prince of Wales and his younger brother, the opportunity to fight for their father after years of uncertainty had finally arrived.
Prince Charles set out from Paris on 25 June 1648, heading first for Calais and thence to the Dutch coast, to take command of the ships that had declared for his father. His aim was to use them as an invasion fleet, to back up the earl of Holland’s county forces and the Scottish army of the duke of Hamilton, which was poised to cross into England. His cousin, Prince Rupert, and two long-standing royalist advisers, Culpeper and Hopton’s accompanied him on his journey and others of his former council, including Hyde, were ordered to join him. Hyde had a miserable journey. The vessel in which he travelled was taken by Spanish frigates off the coast of Ostend, his jewels and money were plundered and it was some time before the Spanish authorities, who governed what is now Belgium, set him at liberty. Then adverse weather conditions delayed his arrival for more than a month. He was too worn by these adventures to conceal his dismay at the disagreements among Prince Charles’s advisers.5
The prince himself was in good spirits, full of optimism after two years spent languishing on the sidelines of the French court, enduring his mother’s marital schemes, the petty rivalries of those around her and Cardinal Mazarin’s polite reluctance to offer any kind of assistance. He hoped that he could count on the support of his brother-in-law, head of the House of Orange as William II following the death of his father, Frederick Henry, at the end of 1647. Charles’s sister was now the first lady of the Netherlands, much to the displeasure of her husband’s mother, whose attitude towards Mary had hardened over the years. The young William II, hostile to Spain and sympathetic to the Stuarts, promised Charles four warships but his ability to do much more was hampered by internal politics and the opposition of the States of Holland. The offer from William at least amounted to more than Charles had received from Mazarin, who had refused all financial help when the prince left France, despite Henrietta Maria’s pleas. But the prince was considerably aggrieved, when he arrived in the Netherlands, to find the fleet ‘in faction and disorder’, a situation for which his ill-advised younger brother was, however unintentionally, responsible.
Mary was relieved, as well as pleased, by Charles’s arrival at The Hague. She had been concerned about the influence of those around James, notably Bampfield, and was afraid that the duke of York was being encouraged down a dangerous road by the ambition of others. After a family reunion, James having been summoned back from Helvoetsluys for the occasion of a formal dinner, the two brothers set off for the coast. Charles was by now well aware of the situation in respect of the fleet and was keen to exert his authority. For, in truth, James had allowed himself to be led very unwisely. Egged on by Bampfield, who resented the arrival of Sir John Berkeley as James’s governor, the boy accepted the role of admiral, to the grave misgivings of those, including his sister, who feared this was a means of Bampfield effectively taking control of the warships and their men. The colonel was a good talker. Clarendon described him as having ‘a wonderful address to the disposing men to mutiny’, aided by the absence of officers to contradict him. He persuaded them ‘to declare for the Duke of York, without any respect to the King or Prince; and when his Highness should be on board, they should not meddle in the quarrel between the King and the Parliament, but entirely join with the Presbyterian party and the city of London.’ Bampfield’s aim was to get Berkeley dismissed from James’s service, ‘and then he believed he should be able to govern both his Highness and the fleet’.6
James liked the acclaim of the seamen and set about making appointments. He was, by all accounts, ready to sail without his elder brother’s knowledge or permission. Charles’s arrival put a stop to this boyish enthusiasm and imposed discipline on what might otherwise have been a foolish and surely ill-fated expedition. He also made sure that Bampfield’s influence on James was checked, sending his younger brother back to The Hague and into Mary’s care. James was displeased but had to acquiesce. Charles, meanwhile, was joined by William Batten, a senior parliamentary naval commander who felt spurned by the preference shown for Rainsborough. It had taken some time for the realization that Batten was unreliable to dawn on his superiors and he was able to take one of parliament’s newest warships with him across to the Netherlands. The Prince of Wales was already at sea when he learned of Batten’s defection and ordered the renegade officer to join him, promptly appointing him rear admiral and knighting him. As Batten had been the commander who ordered his men to bombard Bridlington when Henrietta Maria landed there in 1643, Prince Charles’s gesture to a man who had caused his mother and her dog to cower in a ditch while under heavy fire was certainly generous, if not misguided. Batten was damaged goods and the royalists with the Prince of Wales, including his cousin, Rupert, were suspicious of him. The new admiral soon lost the trust of the seamen and seemed notably reluctant to fight. He was replaced in October 1648 by Rupert but by that time the royalist revolt in England was well and truly over.
It was the misfortune of the Prince of Wales to get a taste of naval command (something that he relished) without ever being able to engage in serious combat or land in England. Like his father, he was basically an onlooker in the second Civil War. The revolts in Wales, in Kent and in Essex were put down without his setting foot on English soil but the Scots still hoped he might find a way to join them, sending the earl of Lauderdale with their response to the prince’s request for help. The reaction of those close to Charles to this unkempt Scot, who lacked their fastidiousness in dress but was, for all his strange appearance, intelligent and able, reeked of English superiority but Charles, somewhat improbably, took to the earl. He agreed, with considerable reluctance, to the demands that Lauderdale carried with him and would have turned the fleet towards Berwick, but the seamen, unpaid, hungry and discontented, were having none of it. They wished to engage the fleet of the earl of Warwick, sent by parliament to challenge the mutinous royalist ships, but a fight at sea was avoided. The Prince of Wales captured several commercial vessels but found that this piracy was losing him the support of alarmed merchants in the city of London, some of whom might have royalist sympathies but who were much more concerned with the threat to their livelihoods. Charles was prevailed upon to return to his sister’s court in the early autumn, his brief career as a privateer over. At some point during the summer or autumn of 1648 (the precise date is unclear) he indulged in a brief dalliance with a lady of easy virtue who called herself Mrs Barlow. History knows her as Lucy Walter and she would be the bane of Charles’s life in the years to come.
By September, he knew that the Scots had suffered a severe defeat the previous month in the north of England, even if Lauderdale put a brazen face on the catastrophe, claiming it should not divert Charles’s purpose of going as soon as possible to Scotland. The prince was not persuaded, and with good reason, for Scotland was, once again, in turmoil. Hamilton’s army crossed the border on 8 July. At less than 10,000 men it was only a third of the force that had been authorized by the Scottish parliament and its soldiers were poorly trained and equipped. A divided command and atrocious weather added to the invaders’ difficulties, while support from northern royalists failed to materialize and the conduct of the army soon shattered any hopes of further recruitment. Harried by the smaller but much more professional force of Major-General John Lambert, Hamilton was kept at bay in the north-west until Cromwell could come up from Wales. After a series of increasingly debilitating encounters around Preston in Lancashire the Scots made a last stand on 18 August and were conclusively defeated. Hamilton was captured a week later near Stafford, bringing an end to a desperate and doomed Scottish intervention on behalf of Charles I. But even as the west of Scotland broke out in open revolt on hearing of the Engagers’ defeat, the English parliament greeted Cromwell’s victory by repealing the Vote of No Addresses and opening negotiations with the king on the Isle of Wight for a new treaty. It seemed that, phoenix-like, royalism could still rise from the ashes.
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The army reacted with predictable alarm to the dogged determination of Presbyterians in parliament to reach some sort of accommodation with Charles I. The Levellers once again became more vocal and renewed their agitation for the removal of the king, freedom of religion, equality before the law and regular elections, this time annual. But nothing was said about extending the franchise and the House of Commons, mindful of likely reaction among the army rank and file, as well as more senior officers, sent a surprisingly low-key reply to the Leveller petition. There was probably an element of stalling in its response, since the fifteen commissioners sent by parliament to the Isle of Wight were divided amongst themselves.
Charles was not, at first, keen to negotiate. He could see little point. But he was also tired of being cooped up in Carisbrooke Castle and his carefully attuned ear soon picked up the whisper of underlying discord among the commissioners, who remained divided along Presbyterian and Independent lines. If he could be restored on terms that, from his perspective, safeguarded his royal dignity for a period of twenty years, then he was prepared to listen. Discussions were supposed to be concluded after forty days but dragged on as the king, sitting under his canopy of state in Newport Grammar School, prevaricated with his usual skill, attempting to balance the demands made on him with his conscience and beliefs. After 2 October, when the Commons rejected his counterproposals, he seems to have felt that it would be best to appear to give in on almost everything in order to maximize his chances of escape. On 9 October he opened his heart to his host, William Hopkins, the master of Newport Grammar School. It is one of the frankest letters he ever wrote and its meaning is crystal-clear:
I pray you rightly to understand my condition, which, I confess, yesternight I did not fully enough explain, through want of time. It is this; notwithstanding my too great concessions already made, I know that, unless I shall make yet others which will directly make me no King, I shall be at best but a perpetual prisoner . . . to deal freely with you, the great concession I made this day – the Church, militia and Ireland – was made merely in order [aid] to my escape, of which if I had not hope, I would not have done; for then I could have returned to my strait prison without reluctancy; but now, I confess, it would break my heart, having done that which only an escape can justify. To be short, if I stay for a demonstration of their further wickedness, it will be too late to seek a remedy; for my only hope is that they now believe I dare deny them nothing, and so be less careful of their guards.7
Privately, his mood was increasingly desperate and he acknowledged his unhappiness in a touching letter to Elizabeth. ‘I am loath to write to those I love when I am out of humour, as I have been these days by past,’ he told her, ‘lest my letters should trouble those I desire to please.’8 So he continued to talk all through October, buoyed by the knowledge that the marquess of Ormonde, who had returned to Ireland at the end of September, seemed on the point of concluding an alliance with the Irish Confederacy following the defection of a prominent Irish supporter of parliament, Lord Inchiquin, to the royalist cause. On 28 October he confirmed the sentiments he had expressed to Hopkins in a letter to Ormonde: ‘Do not startle at my great concessions concerning Ireland,’ he wrote ‘for . . . they will come to nothing.’9 Neither did his continued hopes of escape. Late at night he confided his hopes to Hopkins on paper, fearful that if he could not get away soon, it would be too late. ‘You cannot make ready too soon . . . Where shall I take boat?’10 He worried about the tides and the wind and other impediments. Yet no further attempt to get away from the island was ever made. The unfortunate Hopkins bankrupted himself entertaining the king and his small band of followers but he was never able to arrange the escape that Charles I so craved.
As the talks dragged on at Newport, concern in the army grew. Fairfax, who had acted firmly in repressing the royalist uprisings of the spring and summer, was now confronting the implications of the bloodshed of those months. He would later seek to distance himself from the eventual complete breakdown of trust between parliament and the army but his own position seems to have been more complex. Ireton, Cromwell’s son-in-law, was so troubled by the Newport Treaty discussions that he tendered his resignation. Fairfax refused it and Ireton set about, instead, the drafting of a document which would outline the army’s concern and suggest a positive way forward. He may, already, have been contemplating the possibility of bringing Charles I to trial, but it was the continued dithering of parliament that forced his hand. The Remonstrance of the Army, delivered to parliament on 20 November 1648, did not mince words. It demanded ‘exemplary justice . . . in capital punishment upon the principal author and some prime instruments of our late wars’. It should be noted, however, that the Remonstrance still did not propose the abolition of monarchy. In keeping with their past inability to judge the mood of the army, the members of the House of Commons decided to postpone consideration of this latest salvo for a full week while they dealt with the most recent responses from the king on the Isle of Wight.
The period from the beginning of December 1648 to the end of January 1649 has fascinated historians down through the centuries and continues to be the source of much debate. What has emerged much more clearly is the hesitancy of the king’s opponents to take irrevocable steps and their concern to come to some accommodation with him that might save both his life and the Stuart monarchy. The popular picture of remorseless Roundheads pursuing a defenceless king to martyrdom has long since been nuanced by scholars who have found not a studied design, the ‘rare dissimulation’ of which Clarendon was later to accuse Cromwell, but in John Adamson’s words, a ‘frightened junto’ anxious about the implications of the situation in all three kingdoms, particularly fearful that Ireland might be the back door by which the king could ultimately triumph, weary of war and desperate to avoid further bloodshed.11 The pressure of circumstances, deeply held religious beliefs and the knowledge that there was no precedent for the situation in which they found themselves rested heavily on men who interpreted what was going on around them as evidence of God’s design. For no one was this dilemma more grave than Oliver Cromwell, the man who less than eighteen months previously had wept to see the king reunited with his children and who was not even in London when relations between the army and parliament reached their nadir. How much he knew in advance of what took place on 6 December, when soldiers commanded by Colonel Thomas Pride excluded members of parliament who had voted in favour of continuing discussions with the king, is, however, another matter.12
Ireton, the prime mover behind these developments, was in correspondence with Cromwell, who had spent the autumn in Scotland and then in the north of England, dealing with fading royalist opposition. Cromwell had opposed the prolonged discussions at Newport, ‘this ruining hypocritical agreement’ as he called it, and in a letter to Robert Hammond he made clearer the beliefs that had been gaining on him over the last year, perhaps since the king’s escape from Hampton Court. He had told the Commons then that ‘they should no longer expect safety and government from an obstinate man whose heart God had hardened’. Yet this did not mean that he was a convinced republican, merely that he was sensing that the removal of Charles I was the only road to peace. Indeed, he may well have considered the possibility of replacing Charles with one of his sons but, as the months went by, options in that respect narrowed, following the escape of the duke of York. But Prince Henry still remained in England, a child who had never known his father, well educated and probably amenable, given the right support, to becoming the head of a much more limited monarchy. A long minority in which he was well imbued with principles that sat comfortably with the views of the Independents had considerable appeal. This option would preserve the monarchy but remove the author of the nation’s woes. It would be given serious consideration again during the frenetic weeks of December 1648.
The last chapter in the life of Charles I had begun a few days earlier. Colonel Isaac Ewer had replaced the increasingly unhappy and uncertain Robert Hammond as governor of the Isle of Wight. Some of those who knew Hammond best were concerned that he was wavering in his commitment to the army and that he might hand Charles over to parliament if so ordered. Cromwell wrote Hammond, his kinsman by marriage, a remarkable letter in late November, urging the younger man to hold firm to his principles, to seek God’s guidance and not to expect ‘good from this Man, against whom the Lord hath witnessed; and whom thou knowest’.13 When Hammond received orders from the army to return the king to close confinement in Carisbrooke Castle, he refused to comply. He was ordered off the island and brought back to the council of officers at Windsor under arrest before the letter from Cromwell actually arrived. He was soon freed but his royal prisoner was not so fortunate.
Awoken by loud knocking in the dark before dawn on 1 December, the king was told that he must make ready to leave Hopkins’ house in the little town of Yarmouth. He was irritated at having to rise so early and even more aggrieved to learn that he was being taken across the water to Hurst Castle, a fortress built by Henry VIII to defend the western approaches to Southampton. It occupied a spit of land sticking out into the Solent, surrounded by unhealthy marshland, and was ill equipped to receive a king. But he had no choice other than to acquiesce. All hope of escape was now gone. Lieutenant-Colonel Saunders, then in charge of Portsmouth, reported to Fairfax: ‘Our God hath done our work for us, all things are quiet in the island, the king went without any opposition to Hurst Castle, and is there. Your work is now before you.’14 That much Fairfax, a man with a deeply troubled heart, already knew.
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Charles spent two weeks at Hurst Castle, taking chilly walks along the shingle beach while the council of officers considered its next move. Aware of the splits among his opponents, of the thundering denunciations of Presbyterian preachers, and optimistic that Ormonde in Ireland might yet offer him deliverance, the king could also look to Europe for assistance now the continent was at peace. The Treaty of Westphalia finally ended the ruinous European conflict of the Thirty Years’ War in October 1648, potentially opening up the possibility of aid from his wife’s nephew, Louis XIV, and his son-in-law, William II of Orange. The implications of rising opposition to government in France and the House of Orange in the Netherlands were not yet obvious. Despite the seeming impregnability of Hurst, the king was able to smuggle letters out to Ormonde and to the Prince of Wales. He remained in touch with events beyond the Tudor fortifications that confined him and while the army officers prayed and debated he tried to win popular support by publishing his Declaration Concerning the Treaty, which sought to put a positive spin on the discussions at Newport, emphasizing how close they had come to success and warning of the dangers to his person and the peace of the country from ‘the illegal proceedings of them that presume from servants to become masters and labour to bring in democracy and abolish monarchy’. Given Charles’s private abjuration of all the main points he had appeared to concede in Newport, there is something unpleasantly hypocritical about the king’s posturing in the Declaration, even if it can be justified by opportunism and pragmatism. But Charles was aiming at an audience that had already lost the main part of the battle, the Presbyterians who had effectively been sidelined by Pride’s Purge. Power now lay with a coalition of army grandees, led by Fairfax and Cromwell, and a group of independent peers that included the present and former governors of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Henry, Northumberland and Pembroke, as well as the earls of Salisbury, Denbigh and Warwick. The earls of Nottingham and Kent also had good relations with the army grandees but none of this was set in stone. The peers wanted to keep communications with the king open for as long as possible and to avoid any trial. They were, in fact, Charles’s best hope but he did not realize this at the time.
In the end it was the pressure of external events that forced decisions on the ‘frightened junto’, as the royalist politician Marchamont Needham labelled them.15 Alarmed by the news that the Dutch states-general had signed a naval and trade treaty with the Irish rebels, the grandees believed that England could be dangerously vulnerable not just to an invasion by Ormonde’s Irish troops, now that they had the means of conveyance, but to a full-scale naval war with the Dutch as well. The peers and the senior army officers agreed that the best way forward was to make one last attempt to offer the king a settlement, one that would avoid both a third civil war and the trial of the king. In preparation for these negotiations, Charles was moved from his isolated prison at Hurst to the much more congenial surroundings of Windsor Castle, one of his great palaces. He arrived there on 23 December, to await the arrival of the earl of Denbigh, who had been entrusted with the mission to persuade him to save his kingdoms and himself.
The importance of Denbigh’s role and the terms he was offering on behalf of the junto have gone largely unnoticed, subsumed by the drama of the king’s trial and execution.16 Yet they were the last attempt by the army and its aristocratic allies to avert a trial which would lead them down an unprecedented and unpredictable path. Not everyone in the army high command believed that the king should escape some form of reckoning but the atmosphere of crisis and an underlying respect for the institution of monarchy itself prevailed. The choice of Basil Feilding, second earl of Denbigh, to approach Charles, was an interesting one. His mother was a Villiers and his uncle had been a favourite of the king’s during his early years on the throne, the assassinated duke of Buckingham. Denbigh was also the brother-in-law of the duke of Hamilton, who was now being held prisoner at Windsor. The earl’s connections with those close to the king were strong but he had followed a different path during the Civil Wars, whether out of conviction or self-interest is hard to say, and he was currently Speaker of the House of Lords. There is a suggestion that he did not personally like Charles I and had been further disenchanted by his dealings with him on the Isle of Wight in December 1647. Clarendon described him as ‘a person very ungracious to the king’, who had bridled at Charles’s response to the parliamentary commissioners (of whom Denbigh was the chief), saying that they were ‘not to be looked upon as common messengers’.17 This prickliness, combined with the lack of diplomatic skills that Denbigh had demonstrated while ambassador to Venice in the 1630s, suggest that he was far from an ideal choice to make crucial overtures to the king.
The terms that Denbigh was authorized to propose would have been unpalatable to Charles I even if they had come from a person with whom he was much more at ease. There were three major concessions required: the king was to abandon his ‘negative voice’ (his power of veto over ministerial appointments), consent to the abolition of episcopacy and disown the agreement with the Scots. Presumably he would also have been required to put a halt to Ormonde’s endeavours in Ireland. This would have left Charles as a nominal king but no better, in his own eyes and those of his followers, than ‘Duke of Venice’. The intention was for Denbigh to put these proposals to Charles on Christmas Day. Whether he did so remains tantalizingly unclear. We do not know whether the king and the earl ever met face to face. The French ambassador, Grignan, who had been watching the situation closely, reported that Denbigh never saw Charles.18 The other possibility is that Charles did admit Denbigh into his presence but then rejected the proposals outright. He was evidently in good spirits and full of confidence. He saw Ormonde as his saviour. No wonder, then, that he was reported as being ‘very pleasant and merry’. Indeed, he was about to rebuff the Denbigh mission publicly with counter-proposals of his own, in His Majesties Last Proposals to the Officers of the Armie. It has been said that, as was so often the case with Charles I, he was offering ‘concessions with menaces’. Certainly there was an obvious threat in the declaration that if his offer to come to London and hold talks with the army grandees was turned down, his Irish subjects and his son, the Prince of Wales, would come to rescue him. His assertion that ‘no law can judge a king’ was certainly something that he believed absolutely. For the officers of the army, the realization that Charles Stuart was unapologetically anticipating another war proved too much. The king had overplayed a hand that was much weaker than he knew.
The decision to go ahead with the king’s trial was made by the Council of Officers on 27 December and the next day the House of Commons set about establishing a high court of justice. This was opposed by the House of Lords but they were ignored. On 4 January 1649, the Commons directly contradicted the king by announcing that they were the ‘supreme power of this nation’. The future of the Stuart monarchy, however, was by no means decided. For several weeks at the turn of 1648–9 it seemed possible that it might, as had previously been contemplated, rest with Prince Henry.
The details of plans to depose the king and replace him with his youngest son remain as murky as the failure of Denbigh’s mission, though the two are closely connected.19 The king’s death was not a foregone conclusion of the trial itself and well into January efforts were still being made to broker a settlement with the king, while Charles seems to have held fast to the notion that there was a growing difference between the more radical and conservative wings of his opponents, a tension that he could exploit to his own benefit. He continued to count on Ormonde, who had threatened Fairfax with retribution if the king was harmed.
Yet in the end, when the trial started on 20 January in the Great Hall at Westminster, Charles must have been conscious of the fact that he was very much alone. Isolated in the Louvre in Paris at the start of 1649, as the civil unrest known as the Fronde raged around her, Henrietta Maria sent letters to parliament and to Fairfax requesting that she be allowed to come to England to see her husband.20 The letters to the Speakers of both Houses were not even opened and the ‘consolation of going to him’, which she requested was denied.21 The Prince of Wales, celebrating Christmas in the Netherlands with James and Mary, also wrote to Fairfax expressing his grave concerns for his father’s health and safety and appealing for the restoration of the king to ‘his just rights’. According to Clarendon, the letter was read in the Council of Officers ‘and laid aside’.22 Neither was a response forthcoming to similar letters sent, at the behest of Anne of Austria, from the young Louis XIV to Cromwell and Fairfax, saying that he was greatly touched by the plight of his uncle and that Cromwell had it in his power to restore Charles I to his rights and dignity.23 By the time the letters were written, the king had met his fate.
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Charles I’s trial and execution have been the subject of many books and articles and the details do not need repetition here. It was his finest hour and the observation has been made, with much justice, that in the extremity of his life, the king achieved a kind of greatness.24 His refusal to recognize the authority of the court or to enter a plea gave him a quiet dignity and a confidence that threatened to derail the entire process. There were many who had opposed him who could not quite believe what they were seeing and were profoundly disturbed by the spectacle of a king on trial for his life. Several interruptions of proceedings by a masked woman in the gallery, later identified as Lady Anne Fairfax, wife of the army leader, gave voice to these wider misgivings. In her case, however, they indicated a more personal turmoil. The Fairfax marriage was far from happy and there were tensions, much satirized by the royalist press, between the staunchly Presbyterian Anne Fairfax and the Cromwells. Lady Fairfax’s influence over her husband was widely credited for the general’s silence during the trial (despite his having been appointed as a commissioner he did not appear) and his lack of public commitment to the regicide.25
Whether Charles I was inwardly as confident as he appeared at his trial is another matter. His life since 1645 had been one long series of setbacks, of incoherent plans, raised hopes and opportunities missed. Ever-stricter confinement was wearisome and demeaning. The splendid regal attire of van Dyck’s portraits had been replaced by more modest dress and an appearance that sometimes bordered on the slovenly. The years had wearied him, adding their weight to a disposition that, deprived of his lively wife, was always inclined to melancholy. Even in 1646, there was a part of him that seemed resigned to his fate. From Newcastle, while in the custody of the Scottish army, he wrote to his supporters with the queen in France: ‘I have already cast up what I am likely to suffer, which I shall meet, by the grace of God, with that constancy that befits me.’26 This acceptance was repeated at intervals thereafter, always in private correspondence with those whom he trusted or loved. From the Isle of Wight, shortly before he was brought back to the mainland, he wrote a moving letter to the Prince of Wales: ‘Let us comfort you with that which is our own comfort, that though affliction may make us pass under the censures of men, yet we look upon it so, as if it procure not, by God’s mercy to us, a deliverance, it will to you a blessing . . . We know not but this may be the last time we may speak to you or the world publicly . . .’27
Yet there still existed in Charles, right up to the moment that the sentence was pronounced, an incredulity that his opponents would take the irrevocable step of executing him. In his own mind, he had committed no crime. Any accommodation he might have made to save his life (and he was given many chances) would, to him, have undermined the royal prerogative. He would not be a king at all. He requested deferment of sentence so that he could address the Lords and Commons in the Painted Chamber of Westminster Palace. In the speech that he prepared, but was never allowed to give, he expressed himself eloquently as the defender of the ancient laws of the kingdom and the rights of its people: ‘Thus you see that I speak not for my own right alone, as I am your King, but also for the true liberty of all my subjects, which consists not in the power of government, but in living under such laws, such a government, as may give themselves the best assurance of their lives, and property of their goods.’ He saw no hope of peace or settlement ‘so long as power reigns without rule or law, changing the whole frame of that government under which this kingdom hath flourished for many hundred years’. So he challenged their ‘pretended authority’ and claimed that ‘the arms I took up were only to defend the fundamental laws of this kingdom against those who have supposed my power hath totally changed the ancient government.’28 He ended with a rousing reminder of better times under Queen Elizabeth, his father and the first years of his own reign.
This appeal to the past, so characteristic of Charles I, went unheard. Sentence was passed on 27 January. The court appointed to try him found him ‘guilty of levying war against the Parliament and people . . . and that he hath been and is the occasioner, author and continuer of . . . unnatural, cruel and bloody wars, and therein guilty of high treason . . . for which the court doth adjudge that he, the said Charles Stuart, as a tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy to the good people of this nation, shall be put to death by the severing of his head from his body.’29 These grim and inexorable words were, for Cromwell and the fifty-eight others who signed the death warrant, the only just outcome of the trial. Charles I had repulsed all efforts to save his life. If he had hoped, up until the moment that the sentence was pronounced, that he could call their bluff, then he miscalculated. He demanded to speak but was removed from the hall, still protesting, back to St James’s Palace, where he had been lodged during the trial. It was the childhood home of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Henry and it was there that they bade him farewell on 29 January.
It was a harrowing and deeply affecting parting. The king had requested that he be allowed to see his younger children before his execution. They were already aware of the sentence, presumably having been told by the earl of Northumberland, a consistent opponent of Charles I but not a supporter of the decision to put him to death. Conveying the news to them must have been the hardest task of Northumberland’s time as their guardian. Elizabeth was distraught and her brother bewildered and concerned by his sister’s distress. Both seem to have been taken aback by their father’s appearance when admitted to his presence. He had aged and an air of vulnerability hung around him that could not be entirely disguised by his own composure. This was in complete contrast to his daughter’s discomfiture. She began to weep uncontrollably and Henry also started to cry. Taking them both on his knees, Charles embraced them and tried to soothe them. He had important things to say that he wanted them to hear. These Elizabeth herself recorded, under the heading ‘What the king said to me, January 29, 1648–9, being the last time I had the happiness to see him’.
He told me he was glad I was come, and although he had not time to say much, yet somewhat he had to say to me, which he could not to another, or leave in writing, because he feared their cruelty was such, as that they could not have permitted him to write to me. He wished me not to grieve or torment myself for him, for that would be a glorious death that he should die – it being for the laws and liberties of this land, and for maintaining the true Protestant religion. He bid me read Bishop Andrews’s sermons, Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity and Bishop Laud’s book against Fisher, which would ground me against Popery. He told me he had forgiven all his enemies, and hoped God would forgive them also; and commanded us, and all the rest of my brothers and sisters, to forgive them. He bid me tell my mother that his thoughts never strayed from her, and that his love should be the same to the last. Withal, he commanded me and my brother to be obedient to her, and bid me send his blessing to the rest of my brothers and sisters, with commendation to all his friends. So, after he had given me his blessing, I took my leave.
Farther, he commanded us all to forgive those people, but never to trust them; for they had been most false to him and to those that gave them power, and he feared also for their own souls; and he desired me not to grieve for him, for he should die a martyr, and that he doubted not but the Lord would settle his throne upon his son, and that we should all be happier than we could have expected to have been if he had lived; with many other things, which at present I cannot remember.30
Desperate to record faithfully her father’s injunctions but unable, because of emotion, to recall everything verbatim, Elizabeth’s slightly disjointed account of their last meeting reveals the torment of the occasion. The king is said to have told her: ‘Sweetheart, you’ll forget this,’ but there was no likelihood of that. She replied she could not forget, as long as she lived.
Charles then turned his attention to the eight-year-old boy sitting on his knee. For little Henry, his message was direct and uncompromising. ‘Sweetheart,’ he said, ‘now they will cut off thy father’s head; mark, child, what I say.’ By this time, the king certainly had his youngest son’s complete, even fascinated, attention. ‘They will cut off my head, and perhaps make thee a king; but mark what I say, you must not be a king, so long as your brothers, Charles and James, do live; for they will cut off thy brothers’ heads (when they can catch them), and cut off thy head too at last; and therefore I charge you do not be made a king by them.’ To which the child, anguished but unshaken by this gruesome depiction of his family’s and his own future, burst out: ‘I will be torn in pieces first.’ His reply ‘made the king rejoice exceedingly’.31
But for Elizabeth, as the king divided his few remaining jewels between the two children, there was no solace. Charles took his leave of them and returned to his chamber, but the princess’s wracking sobs brought him briefly back out again. A last embrace and blessing, and he was gone. The children returned to Syon House and how they passed the day of their father’s execution is not known.
The king spent his last hours in prayer with Bishop Juxon of London, who was permitted to attend him, and writing letters to his family. To the Prince of Wales he had already composed a lengthy homily, in which he clearly still hoped for a reprieve but accepted that death was the likelier outcome. This last testament reveals the depth of his religious convictions and how central they were to his vision of the responsibilities of kingship. ‘The true glory of princes,’ he wrote, ‘consists in advancing God’s glory, in the maintenance of true religion and the Church’s good; also in the dispensation of civil power, with justice and honour to the public peace.’ If his son kept to the true principles of piety, virtue and honour, then ‘you shall never want a kingdom’.32
Charles received his last letter from his eldest son from the hands of the stalwart royalist Henry Seymour, an experienced and successful courier of messages, on the evening of 28 January. He gave Seymour the final messages to be conveyed to Prince Charles and to Henrietta Maria. The occasion threatened to overwhelm the faithful Seymour, who was desolate to find his sovereign so changed. His response was very similar to that of Princess Elizabeth and he was a grown man: ‘Mr Seymour, at his entrance, fell into a passion, having formerly seen His Majesty in a glorious state and now so dolorous; and having kissed the king’s hand, clasped about his legs, lamentably mourning.’33
On the bitterly cold afternoon of 30 January 1649, with snow threatening, the first Charles Stuart stepped out of the Banqueting House, part of his Whitehall Palace, onto a balcony where a scaffold had been especially constructed. Serene in his faith, he told Bishop Juxon that he was going from a corruptible to an incorruptible Crown, where there would be no more trouble. His small stature never detracted from a regal presence and his nobility of demeanour in those final moments was impressive. The crowd who came to watch, kept back by a strong military presence, were too far away to hear him acknowledge his eternal regret at the part he had played in Strafford’s fate, or utter the famous words which epitomized the creed by which he had lived and for which he was about to die. ‘A subject and a sovereign,’ he told them, ‘are clean different things.’ He died bravely, his head severed, mercifully, with one stroke of the axe. There is a story that Oliver Cromwell visited the corpse as it lay in its coffin at Whitehall and muttered the words ‘Cruel necessity’ over the fallen king. The tale is not contemporary and did not gain currency until the eighteenth century but, even if apocryphal, it still contains a kind of truth. The king’s opponents were as unswerving in their belief in God’s justice and providence as Charles I had been. And they had proved the stronger during the Civil Wars.34
For the children he left behind, scattered across three countries, their father’s death was cruel indeed. In their grief, they would have agreed with the summation, made years afterwards, by Edward Hyde: ‘He was the worthiest gentleman, the best master, the best friend, the best husband, the best father and the best Christian that the age in which he lived had produced.’35 Now his children, like the three kingdoms he had ruled, faced an uncertain future in which they, too, would be ‘clean different things’.