King Charles II (17 page)

The various excuses given to the King’s messenger, Johann Adam von Karpfen, and relayed by him dolefully back to Charles
II
, remind one of the lame explanations given in the parable of the wedding guests. But this is of course unfair to princes still genuinely suffering from the depredations of the Thirty Years’ War, which had only ended officially six months before.

As these little fish declined the honour, Charles did not fare any better with the great powers. France was temporarily freed from the nightmare of civil war by April, but that did not imply an immediate ability to look outside her own boundaries, since domestic unrest continued. (Civil war broke out again in January 1650.) A mission to the Imperial Court in October by Sir Wolfgang William de Swan met with results similar to the unhappy round-up of the Electors. A delicate postscript to a letter from the Elector of Saxony, expressing as usual his regrets, enquired whether all the English had complied with the King’s murder or just ‘the meaner classes’? If merely the latter, perhaps Charles would win back the minds of his loyal subjects by ‘friendliness’ and the use of the United Kingdom?
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Friendliness, and the use of the United Kingdom, although excellent ideas in principle, were more difficult for the King to apply in exile than the Elector imagined. The use of the United Kingdom in particular raised up those twin religious spectres: the employment of Ireland brought with it a whiff of Popery; that of Scotland involved taking the Oath of the Covenant. The original Oath of the Covenant of 1638 had been reinforced by the Solemn League and Covenant in 1643. The death of one king and the accession of another had only exacerbated these problems. It is probable that a message was sent by Charles to Argyll in July, suggesting that he would join with the Scots – if the Solemn League and Covenant was
not
pressed upon him.
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But the Covenanting Scots were still cock-a-hoop at the fall of the Engagers, and as a result more obdurate than ever on the need to take the oath as a price of their assistance.

Under the circumstances Ireland was once more considered to be the more alluring prospect. In preparation for the expedition
there, it was decided to take Charles and his Court back to Jersey. He had returned to France in June and spent the summer at Saint-Germain. He landed at St Helier on 17 September, accompanied by the Duke of York. A contemporary diarist gives a sombre picture of the royal brothers at church in St Helier: the King in deep purple mourning, unrelieved except for the Star of the Garter on his cloak; James a tall, slight figure in black.
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It was characteristic of the jumpiness of the time that there were fears for their assassination even within Jersey itself: attendants were ordered to wear swords; sentries were posted.

This new sojourn in the island – which was to last for five months – was of a very different nature from the King’s previous jaunt three-and-a-half years earlier. Then he had been young in spirit, at the beginning of his ordeal. Now, in the words of his father’s last letter, he had the advantage of wisdom over most princes, having spent the years of discretion in ‘the experience of troubles and exercise of patience’. The late King had suggested that piety and other virtues, both moral and political, would develop more easily under such circumstances, as trees in winter thrive, rather than in ‘warmth and serenity of times’.
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It was true. Charles’ experience of troubles so early in his maturity had certainly brought out in him virtues which might otherwise have remained latent. The need to display public courage rather than private grief, this was implanted in Charles, along with the other qualities which would mark his exile – resilience, a splendid kind of grit, and, even in the most terrible situations, a sort of buoyancy evidently chosen as an alternative to despair. Lastly, he was beginning to display an ability to keep his own counsel. But of course other less admirable attributes may take root in the wintry soil of adversity. These include the ability to mislead or trick, the will to deceive – attributes which are sometimes essential for survival but can never win a chorus of praise for those who possess them. During the next eighteen months Charles would demonstrate, generally for the better, but also on occasion for the worse, what sort of man the experience of troubles had made of him.

In Jersey there were at least pleasures to be tasted. Some were the guileless pleasures common to monarchs down the
ages (although hitherto denied to Charles), such as a review of the island troops, which took place on the sands. Charles was also able to indulge his love of riding and sailing. Both the King and the Duke of York had brought with them their dwarfs who acted as pages and playthings. The beautiful and bossy Mrs Christabella Wyndham was back again, ruling everyone, as Pepys heard later, ‘like a Minister of State’.
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But money was, and continued to be, an obsessional concern. Before he left the island, Charles issued an order for a mint to be set up with a view to issuing coinage for the new reign: once more Jersey was the only place where his writ ran sufficiently for the order to have any kind of plausibility. Yet there were no resources for the mint to be established and in fact the order was never carried out.
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In November Charles was asking Sir George Carteret to expedite the arrival of the money voted to him for ‘supply’ by the island: he really had very little else to live on. The royal demesne in Jersey had to be sold. The King and the Duke of York themselves kept a very simple court, cutting down on the number of dishes served; their attendants would doubtless have preferred slightly more pomp, especially since certain of them existed on the consumption of the left-over dishes. Others were allotted board wages, to be paid when the money came in (and when would that be?). In general, the courtiers were in wretched straits.

And of course the quarrels broke out all over again. The personalities surrounding the King continued to clash. The presence of the veteran Sir Edward Nicholas – he was approaching sixty – in Charles’ counsels was generally felt to be an asset: he was described by Hyde in his
History
as ‘a very honest and industrious man, and always versed in business’.
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He had been Secretary of State to Charles
I
, and was appointed in the same position to Charles
II
. The only trouble with Nicholas’ honesty was that it filled him with natural distaste for court intrigues; that in turn did not necessarily make him the best man to deal with them. Like Hyde, he was an Anglican; like Hyde, he disapproved of the notion of further negotiations, covert or overt, with the Scots.

Less salubrious in Charles’ inner circle was the presence of Lord Percy. Here was another devotee of Queen Henrietta Maria, and, when one considers the calibre of her other Cavalier, Lord Jermyn, it is evident that somehow the Queen did not attract men of judgement to her side. This was particularly regrettable when the men in question passed into her son’s counsels. Despite his loyalty to the Queen, Percy was a Presbyterian, which put him in natural opposition to Hyde or Nicholas. Percy had also fought a duel with Prince Rupert during those bad days at The Hague the previous year. Not only religiously but also philosophically Percy advocated giving in to the demands of the Scots, on the grounds that they represented the power of the moment. Although Hyde described Percy angrily as an atheist, it was in fact a Hobbesian view. At least it was to Percy’s credit that he had been a brave soldier; he had another talent – even his enemy Hyde praised his flair for economical household management.

The King’s private secretary, Sir Robert Long, was an altogether more doubtful character. He had entered Charles’ story as secretary to the Council of the Prince of Wales in the West Country, when, it will be recalled, he had caused trouble by demanding to sit on the Council proper. There had also been some unpleasant innuendoes concerning his loyalty, including a tale that he had been in touch secretly with the Parliamentary commander Essex; in a couple of years’ time there would be more trouble, when he would be alleged to have shown the King’s correspondence to Henry Ireton. But Long too enjoyed the favour of Henrietta Maria, which put him in the same camp as Percy and ranged him against Hyde and Nicholas.

Throughout the autumn, as preparations for the Irish venture were made, these disputes smouldered on, with the occasional spark flying. The King himself came in for criticism: he was not attending to his business sufficiently. It was a charge which was already familiar to Charles and we shall meet it again and again after the Restoration. During this troubled period Charles had a habit of meeting a situation in which nothing could be done with an assumption of indifference, even indolence, and for that he should not have been blamed. But the active members of
his entourage fretted at the delays, and looked round for a scapegoat: the King’s reputation for laziness was always conveniently to hand.

For better or for worse, the Irish plans were destined to come to nothing. The earnest little court at Jersey plotted and prepared and nagged throughout the autumn; all the while the victorious campaign of Oliver Cromwell had quite put an end to any possibility of the King landing there. It was in September at Drogheda, north of Dublin, and in October at Wexford, on the south-east tip of Ireland, that Cromwell instigated those fabled blood-baths which conquered Ireland, for the time being (and, incidentally, blackened his reputation for ever). Yet, owing to the perennial difficulty of communications, it was not until late in the year that the devastating news reached the King and his advisers.

At the orders of Parliament, Cromwell had set out to stop Ireland being used as a beachhead for an invasion of England on behalf of the Royalists. In that, he had succeeded only too triumphantly. Even if Prince Rupert’s naval skills had enabled Charles to land in Ireland at one of the remaining unoccupied ports, such as Waterford, the King would have found little for his comfort on arrival. Cromwell had reduced the royal forces to a series of pitiful, isolated and beleaguered fortresses.

With hopes of Ireland gone, the situation in England was hardly more encouraging than it had been immediately after the execution. As one correspondent wrote in the spring of 1650, the King’s party there was ‘so poor, so disjointed, so severely watched’ that they could do nothing on their own. The same source suggested that ‘a good understanding’ between the King’s party and the Presbyterians might at least enable the English Royalists to rise again.
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It was a conclusion which could no longer be avoided.

The thin lips of the Covenanting Scots began to stretch in a new smile of welcome, confident that this time the King could not elude their rigid embrace.

Given that King Charles
II
had a moral duty to try and recover his throne as soon as possible, he had absolutely no alternative
at the beginning of 1650 but to try Scotland once more. He was a monarch. He had inherited a kingdom. He must now seek to wrest that kingdom from its unlawful possessors. It was up to him to establish who, if anyone, could help him in the task. This explains, among other things, how Charles, having decided to try the Covenanters once more, also gave a commission to Argyll’s sworn enemy, the Marquess of Montrose. As a result, Montrose landed at Kirkwall in the Orkney islands in January 1650.

At the time when it was made in Jersey, this decision represented an intelligible desire to utilize all available pro-monarchical forces within Scotland. If Montrose did well, he would strengthen the King’s hand in his coming negotiations with the Covenanters. If he did
very
well, he might even make these same negotiations both abortive and unnecessary. But it was most unfortunate that Montrose landed at Kirkwall before he received a crucial letter from the King, written from Jersey and dated 12 January. In this letter Charles broke the news that he was once more contemplating meeting the terms of the Scots. Montrose, in his ignorance and innocence, campaigned in Scotland quite unaware of what was taking place elsewhere in Europe.

Montrose was a man of strong sensibilities, black and white loyalties. He had performed an important psychological role after the execution of King Charles
I
by transmitting some of his own enthusiasm for recovering the throne to the King’s son: the arch-traitors who had murdered his beloved master could and would be defeated. He wrote to his new sovereign, ‘As I never had passion upon earth so strong as that to do your King father service, so it shall be my study … to show it redoubled for the recovery of you.’
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That was the kind of servant of whom Charles stood in need in the dark days of 1649.

But Montrose was also excitable, a noble figure not only to his age, but to himself. Later Burnet wrote of him that he took upon him the deportment of a hero too much ‘and lived as in a romance’. Hyde more calmly described him as ‘a man of
éclat
’ who lived in style with numerous servants.
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It is a fact that the presence of a romantic character on the stage of history frequently
upsets the balance of the whole plot. To a certain extent this was true of Charles’ involvement with Montrose. Naturally Montrose’s supporters took the King’s new negotiations with the Covenanters much amiss. Montrose’s correspondence with Charles was subsequently published in Paris, with the deliberate intention of disrupting relations between King and Covenanters. Yet Charles’ intention at this point was hardly to betray Montrose – something for which he had no possible motive, uncertain as he was of the whole Covenanter situation. He did however entertain hopes that he might frighten the Covenanters by his use of Montrose: much as they loathed Montrose, they might be persuaded by jealousy to take some kind of corporate action with him. In corporate action in Scotland, the King was convinced – as were most sensible people – lay the true salvation.

Charles finally left Jersey on 13 February 1650. Warrants for the Court in Jersey towards the end of the previous year show one hundred pounds paid to Robert Long for parchment, paper, quills, wax and so forth.
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That was the measure of the ceaseless correspondence which had preceded his embarkation. And the cost of the departure itself was not small. It certainly strained the slender Jersey exchequer. Now that he decided to take the plunge and meet the Scots again, Charles’ intention was to make the bravest showing possible, if only to demonstrate that they might be dealing with a pauper, but they were also dealing with a King. He even went to the trouble of acquiring some new clothes – although clothes were never one of his ruling passions – because the rest of his wardrobe was ‘so spotted and spoiled’. An embroidered suit with hatband and belt was ordered, and another plain riding suit, with an ‘innocent [spotless] coat’.
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