King Charles II (16 page)

Later that night the Princess wrote down the contents of the interview in full, the first and most affecting of all the many documents which form the martyrology of King Charles
I
.
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The King spoke to the girl of her mother: she should tell Queen Henrietta Maria ‘that his thoughts had never strayed from her, and that his love should be the same to the last’.

But even in such a poignant moment the King did not forget the future of the royal house he had tried in vain to serve, and had only succeeded in ruining. The interests of the true succession must remain paramount. There must be no young puppet kings in the hands of Parliament, agreeing to conditions which older and wiser heads would have rejected. Elizabeth was to tell James Duke of York that in future Charles was to be to him not only his elder brother but also his king. To the eight-year-old Harry, the King was even more explicit. Taking the boy onto his knee, he told him, ‘Sweetheart, now they will cut off thy father’s head.’

Then, as Harry continued to gaze steadily at his father, the King patiently explained the most important worldly message of all: ‘Mark what I say, you must not be a king as long as your brothers Charles and James do live. For they will cut off your brothers’ heads when they can catch them, and cut off thy head too at the last. And therefore I charge you, do not be made a king by them.’

The little boy sighed deeply and to his father’s gratified surprise said very firmly, ‘I will be torn in pieces first.’ The King ended on a note of a martyr’s holy pride: ‘And that he doubted not but that the Lord would settle his throne upon his son … and that we should all be happier than we could have been if he had lived.’

That son was in the meantime in a state of turmoil and despair. The only step he was not prepared to take on behalf of his father is the one sometimes ascribed to him in popular mythology – the presentation of a blank sheet of paper to the generals, bearing his signature, for them to name their own terms to save his father’s life.
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It had been dinned into Charles by the King that nothing was worth the sacrifice of the Church of England, whose preservation was bound up with that of the monarchy itself. If the generals had demanded a series of religious concessions, Charles knew well his father would not have wished to live on those terms.
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Charles thrashed about him, looking for foreign aid. Letters were sent on behalf of Louis
XIV
to both Oliver Cromwell and to Fairfax, whose withdrawal from the proceedings had given rise to false hopes that he might head some northern or even Scottish-based rescue attempt. But it was symptomatic of the tense, icy, suspicious – and determined – atmosphere which prevailed among the remaining Army leaders in London, that the generals did not even dare open these letters, and those of the States-General, except in the presence of three hundred officers. In the same way the Dutch emissaries were heard on Monday, 29 January, in complete silence. Afterwards no comment was given. None was necessary. In England the Gadarene hours were rushing by towards the execution of the King.

Tuesday, 30 January, was the appointed day. Then, at the very last minute, there was a hitch. Curiously enough, it was the existence of Charles Prince of Wales which held up the proceedings and brought about that very delay which foreign supplication could not achieve.

It was suddenly realized that the execution of King Charles
I
was not enough. That would simply leave the junta and England itself with the spectre (or vision) of King Charles
II
. It would be a powerful case of ‘The King is dead, long live the King’. For although the House of Lords had been abolished in early January, leaving the House of Commons with the self-appointed power to pass new statutes without the agreement of either Lords or King, no one had yet got round to the task of abolishing the monarchy itself. They had all been too much involved in the process of cutting off the King’s head with the crown on it, in the jovial, blackguardly phrase ascribed to Oliver Cromwell. There was no time before the execution to pass through such a radical measure – in fact, the monarchy was not officially abolished until six weeks later – but something had to be done about the succession. Otherwise they might cut off the King’s head to their heart’s content, but the crown would merely be transferred by the devout monarchists to another head of the Royal Hydra, the head of the Prince of Wales.

In the course of that freezing January morning an urgent
measure was passed ‘that no person whatsoever should presume to declare Charles Stewart (son of the late Charles) commonly called the Prince of Wales, or any other person, to be King, or chief magistrate, of England and Ireland….’ Only then was it time for the King, wearing two shirts against the cold so that he should not shiver and be mistaken for a coward, to step out of a window in the Palace of Whitehall towards the ready scaffold.

‘I go from a corruptible crown to an incorruptible crown,’ the King told his chaplain, Bishop Juxon, ‘where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world.’ To the Bishop also he entrusted his last letter to his son, a long message of advice and blessing. It was a sad and sapient document, in which Charles was pressingly advised to take his stand on goodness and piety: how much better to be ‘Charles le Bon’ than ‘Charles le Grand’, how much better to be ‘good than great’.
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In the meantime the frantic boy in Holland, in ignorance of this last pacifist testament, was still searching for military support, believing correctly that one who was held by the sword would only be rescued by it. And otherwise would die by it.

Just after two o’clock in the afternoon that day the King went finally to his incorruptible crown. He was dressed all in black, but with the George, the insignia of the Garter, a jewel made of a single onyx. This he handed to Bishop Juxon, with the instruction that it should be given to the Prince of Wales together with the single word, ‘Remember’. As his head left his body, cleft by the axe of the masked executioner whose identity would be for ever hidden from posterity for fear of vengeance, a great groan went up from the spectators: a groan which, like the deed itself, would never be forgotten by those who witnessed it. They had no need of onyx jewel or last instruction. They would remember.

It was not until 5 February that Charles, in Holland, learned that the corruptible crown was now his.

Immediately after the execution the ports had been sealed, in an effort to stop the intelligence reaching the Continent until the situation in England was stabilized under the new regime. The news itself seeped into Holland in that most horrid of all
forms for those who are waiting: bad news received in a series of newspaper reports, at first unsubstantiated, later growing in circumstantial detail.

But Charles himself did not learn the news from these reports. Once his advisers had to accept that the worst had happened, there was a terrible debate amongst them as to how they should tell him.
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The method chosen provided a bitter contrast to that famous romantic night scene at Kensington Palace by which the young Victoria, two hundred years later, would learn, from the royal address of her courtiers, that she had become Queen.

Charles’ chaplain, Stephen Goffe, used the same expedient. He entered the room and, after a slight hesitation, began: ‘Your Majesty—’

To the agonized son, he needed to say no more. After the weeks of uncertainty, Charles burst into bitter weeping. To Goffe he could not speak. Eventually he made a sign for him to leave. For several hours, Charles
II
, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, otherwise Charles Stuart, son of that man of blood Charles Stuart the elder, remained quite alone.

1
The blank sheet of paper preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, bearing the signature Charles P, said to be proof of the story, is in fact some kind of Irish military instruction.

‘It’s needful sometimes to hold a candle to the devil.’

O
f all his father’s former dominions, it was only in Jersey that Charles
II
was now declared King. There he was proclaimed – actually in French – ‘
Vive le Roy Charles Second
’ – on 16 February 1649, seventeen days after the execution. Up till then the dreadful rumours had not been believed.

In vain the drums of the devoted island rolled, the cannons roared, and the governor, Sir George Carteret, waved his hat, shouting the loyal slogan.
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Throughout England itself there was a blankness, a silence, in which the Royalists felt as though they were in some hideous dream, unable to move; and even the Roundheads were shocked by the measures to which rebellion had brought them.

This apathy contrasted with the cheerful energy of the new men as they set about to design their Kingless, godly Commonwealth. While Parliament designed a new seal for itself, showing the House of Commons on one side and Britain – lopped off at the Scottish border – on the other, Jersey had a new seal designed for the new King. Nowhere else was it safe to do so. This rare object showed St George on its obverse mounted on a charger: a quixotic gesture from tiny Jersey.

From the point of view of this new King, the loyalty of Jersey was less crucial than the attitude of his lopped-off kingdom,
Scotland. The Scots as a whole remained monarchist; in any case, they were not disposed to have their monarchy abolished for them by the English. In Scotland Charles
II
was officially proclaimed King at the Mercat Cross of Edinburgh on reception of the news of his father’s death. That at least was something.

The frontispiece to the cult book of the ‘martyrdom’ of King Charles
I
(
Eikon Basilike
) shows his son receiving his crown from two angels. How much of it was written by the King himself is debatable, but as Charles
I
’s own account of his sufferings,
Eikon Basilike
had a wide readership in a Europe concussed by the English King’s death. Charles
II
showed his own devotion to the book by having copies bound, with ‘CR’ and a death’s head on the cover; these were presented to his intimates at The Hague.
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Nevertheless, with the exception of Scotland (and Jersey), the two symbolic angels supporting the new King on the book’s frontispiece were alone in their task.

Despite the shock which the late King’s execution administered to other crowned heads, the impact did not prove conducive to action. In May the Elector of Brandenburg wrote with regard to Charles
II
, ‘The occasion seems suitable for all Christian princes to come to the help of His Majesty, to avenge as befits, the dreadful and never-before-heard-of deed….’ The Elector went on to promise to try and persuade his own Diet to assist, since he himself had, alas, neither money nor men. From the Princess Regent of Hesse Cassel, Amelia Elizabeth, it was roughly the same sad story: she referred poignantly to the ‘hateful deed and inexcusable prosecution’, but troops and money were quite another matter. Wolfgang Wilhelm, Count of Neuburg, had a cosy feeling that ‘God the Almighty, the righteous judge, will not allow such a criminal deed to go unpunished….’ But when it came to the question of himself carrying out this divine vengeance, he spoke of the burden of taxes and recent wars against his people. The Elector of Cologne only wished he could help with money, men or mustering-places. The Archbishop of Mainz deplored the murder of the late King but was still lacking ‘the most desirable part’ of his archiepiscopal lands as a result of recent conflicts. The Bishop of Würzburg professed himself bankrupted by the quartering
troops. The Count of Hatzfeldt referred piteously to the subject of his own imprisonment in 1646.
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