King Charles II (28 page)

Charles himself also described an existence in Cologne which recalls that of the exiled Duke in
As You Like It
, fleeting the time carelessly in the Forest of Arden: ‘Despite lack of money we dance and play as if we have taken the Plate-Fleet,’ he wrote. As Charles told his aunt Elizabeth of Bohemia in one of his wry, joking letters, they had only two lacks: ‘the one for want of fiddlers, the other for somebody both to teach and assist at dancing the new dances’. Otherwise all was perfection. Charles also ordered clothes, a sword, and a quantity of shoes (his obsession): three black and three coloured pairs from a Paris shoemaker, and six more from one in Flanders.
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But Sir Edward Nicholas’ stoicism and the King’s good cheer cannot conceal the fact that one of Charles’ main reasons for picking on Cologne was its convenience as a collecting station for the money granted to him by the Imperial Diet. And that money proved as difficult to elicit as the French pension…. The Elector of Cologne only paid up ‘his small quota’, as Hyde described it, after an importunity ‘unfit to have been pressed upon any other prince or gentleman’.
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Furthermore, the Elector excused himself from paying an official call on Charles on the chilly grounds of ‘ill-health’. The warmth of the City Magistrates was not paralleled by that of the Princes.

When the Count of Neuburg invited King Charles and Princess Mary to Düsseldorf, they accepted with alacrity. On 29 October they repaired there by water, floating down the Rhine in a kind of Siegfried idyll. At the end of the journey the Count and Countess awaited them, surrounded by a full assembly of their court with many an elaborate ceremony and repast to follow. For instance, twenty-two tables and sixty-eight dishes were designated for the evening banquet – one hopes that the starving English courtiers of Cologne revelled in the experience. There was music, new to their ears but delightful all the same, and the Count, who prided himself on his civilized way of life, did not even drink too much (unlike some other Germans of their experience).

It was unfortunate that the taste and elegance of the Count was not matched by that of his wife Elizabeth Amalia of Hesse Darmstadt: Charles had already declared himself against the notion of marrying a German wife – ‘I hate Princesses of cold northern countries’
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– and the Countess did little to dissuade him from his prejudice. Having no French, she decided to take no part in the festivities, but sat in an ungraciously lumpen manner throughout the banquet.

From Düsseldorf King Charles and Princess Mary ventured daringly a little way into the Spanish Netherlands, although Charles had no permission to do so. Then it was back to Cologne, where, after the Düsseldorf jaunt, the rest of the winter passed somewhat sadly and even sourly. The Elector still did not call. Charles studied French, studied Italian, hunted and – walked. He had no coach. He walked in the walled city. One of Thurloe’s spies described him walking ceaselessly in the icy weather, bare-headed through this city which, originally a little paradise, had become an open prison. And of course the quarrels had broken out all over again among his advisers.

Under the circumstances, it was natural for all concerned with the royal fortunes to cast their eyes anew at England, since the near prospect was so unsatisfying. After only a few months Cologne was as stale as any other refuge. Temperamentally, Charles liked Germany no better than he liked the northern
princesses. Years later, when the King was told that the widowed Duchesse de Châtillon, his lovely Bablon, was going to remarry and live in Germany, he observed with feeling, ‘If she knew the country, that’s to say, the way of living there and the people, so well as I do, she would suffer very much in France before she would change countries.’
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In England after 1653 some kind of revival of Royalist spirit had at last taken place. In November 1653 King Charles gave the first written credentials to an organization terming itself the Sealed Knot, as the official organ of Royalist conspiracy in England.
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It had always been Hyde’s contention that the King was not only most likely to be restored from within England, but also most beneficially – thus the stain of foreign aid would not be seen on his royal robe. But it was also part of Hyde’s policy, with which the King heartily agreed, that the English rising, when it came, should be a co-ordinated once-and-for-all affair. The Sealed Knot was given its commission as much to hold in check other unplanned and thus doomed risings, as to set in motion its own.

The trouble was that the English conspirators were as disunited at home as the English Court abroad. The Sealed Knot could not prevent the eruption of two irresponsible plots in the summer of 1654, that of Gerard and the so-called Ship Tavern Plot.

When a splinter group, calling themselves the Action Party, decided to plan a major coup for the spring of 1655, the King found himself in a highly awkward and even embarrassing situation as regards the Sealed Knot. First, he was well aware that without the active participation of the Knot the rising was hardly likely to succeed. Secondly, the leading members of the Knot declined to take part, unless actually ordered to do so by the King. Thirdly, the Action Party made it clear that they intended to go ahead in any case, with or without the Knot.

This embarrassment culminated in the disastrous events of the spring of 1655. As the King paced round icy and far-off Cologne, he was compelled to receive the mission of an agitated member of the Action Party, Thomas Ross, who arrived at the end of January and implored him to give his group the royal
support. This put Charles in a quandary. He outlined it succinctly to the Knot representatives. How could he order the Sealed Knot to go against its own military judgement? On the other hand, ‘nor can it be reasonable for me to hinder them [i.e. the Action Party] from moving, who believe themselves ready for it….’ He concluded gloomily to the Knot members: ‘And yet I cannot look for any great success, if whilst they stir, you sit still.’
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With hindsight it is easy to see that the King’s eventual course of action did nothing to mitigate the conspirators’ difficulties. He instructed Daniel O’Neill to negotiate between the two parties, to try and work out some agreement between themselves; he also despatched the new Lord Rochester (the former Lord Wilmot) to England. What Charles failed to do was provide some kind of firm authority which all sides would respect. Ormonde, who was at Antwerp, and sent emissaries from both conspiratorial factions, slightly favoured the Action Party, but was well aware of the need for a positive decision from the King, ‘else it would be the certain loss of those that shall appear, and the very probable destruction of those that hold off’.
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Yet Charles’ indecision – which is what it amounted to – reflected only too accurately his cut-off state, the impossibility of reaching any kind of major conclusion about a country of whose conditions he remained lamentably ignorant. In this sense, it is difficult to criticize the King too harshly. All one can do is note a creeping vacillation in the nature and policies of King Charles from 1655 onwards. Nicholas called this vacillation ‘The fatal custom of his family’.
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This is unjust. For the first twenty-four years of his life we have seen in King Charles a decisive, even heroically active, character: now this new strain of inaction develops to complicate what was originally a comparatively simple nature. Its genesis in the tense conditions of exile is easily understood. But it is a further ironic fact, as we shall see, that in exile the King did as well by inaction as by action – taking the long view.

However, that consoling notion was not available to the wretched conspirators of March 1655. Nothing happened at all in Leicestershire or Staffordshire (where plans collapsed). These
conspirators were the lucky ones. In the North too nothing of any great consequence happened, except that Rochester arrived, and had to make yet another escape from the British Isles once it was realized that the government had the insurrection well in hand. The rising itself was officially postponed – except that the news did not reach the West.

There Colonel John Penruddock, a member of the Action Party, did enter Salisbury and seized the town on 12 March. The rumour – incorrect – of Leveller participation in the rising had the unfortunate effect of spurring on the government to vengeance without assisting the conspirators. This merely gave the Protectoral government an excellent excuse for repression via a much-increased militia, once they had put the rising down with comparative lack of effort. Indeed, the regime of the Major-Generals, a military rule by districts instituted in England shortly afterwards, was happily attributed by the government to the necessities imposed by the Penruddock Rising. Yet the Rising never posed the faintest danger to the established regime: what with the infiltration of the Sealed Knot organization by government spies and the quarrels of the English Court abroad, there was little to fear. The prejudices of the latter included the refusal to employ the Catholic Sir Marmaduke Langdale in Yorkshire, although he was a person of much influence there, and a noted soldier.

Naturally the King in Cologne knew nothing of this. He went as far as to move secretly to Middleburg in Zeeland, hoping from this convenient spot to be summoned to England. His host was a Dutchman named William Krimson, who had married a woman from the household of Charles’ aunt Elizabeth of Bohemia; the secret of Charles’ destination was only imparted to Hyde, Nicholas and two others. Letters were to be addressed to a Mr William Thomas at the Sign of the Town of Rouen, an inn in Flushing, and from there would be conveyed to Middleburg. Despite all these elaborate precautions, it was not so easy for Charles to elude the Protectoral spies in Cologne. Henry Manning, for example, furious at the King giving him the slip, tracked him to Flushing, where the presence of one of Charles’ retainers gave away the secret. It is touching to find that Charles
employed his old alias from Penderel days, Jackson, during his sojourn at Middleburg. And Ormonde reported that the presence of the daughter of the house, ‘though little more than a girl’, made ‘Mr Jackson’s’ confinement more supportable.
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In every other way the episode was abortive and slightly ludicrous. Wild rumours reached the King that the whole of north Yorkshire had declared for him … that towns as far apart as Exeter and Newcastle had risen up in his favour … that Fairfax had five thousand men behind him and had declared for Charles … that the Protector was dead … all untrue.

On 9 April the King, disillusioned and despairing, went quietly back to Cologne. He maintained his spirit in his public verdict on the Penruddock rising when he criticized his critics: ‘Those people, who take upon them to censure whatsoever I do … They who will not believe anything to be reasonably designed, except it be successfully executed, had need of a less difficult game to play than mine is.’ And he ended with a jocular boast: ‘I shall live to bid you welcome to Whitehall.’
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But of that coming to pass, in the summer of 1655, there seemed but a slender chance.

‘You will do well to put him [Cardinal Mazarin] in mind that I am not yet so low, but that I may return both the courtesies and the injuries I have received.’

H
ope was the necessary diet of all the exiled Royalists; above all, it was the food on which their King had to live. It was more through hope than conviction that King Charles now concentrated his ambitions on a Spanish treaty.

The failure of the Penruddock Rising made it abundantly clear that the English Royalists – from whom Hyde had persisted in expecting salvation – were good for nothing of consequence at the present time. That in itself was a considerable blow to Hyde’s prestige, as several observers noted. To balance the decline of Hyde’s pro-English policy came the rise of Protectoral aggression towards Spain. The summer of 1655 saw an expedition on behalf of Cromwell to the West Indies, whose most significant achievement was the capture of Spanish-held Jamaica. The King of Spain’s beard was singed.

Optimists in Royalist circles thought that hostilities between Spain and England must soon follow – in fact, it was not until the spring of 1656 that war was actually declared. Pessimists paid more attention to the development of the alliance between Cardinal Mazarin and Oliver Cromwell, two men who had in common strength and initiative, the qualities of the self-made.

At the same time, there were startling whispers that Cromwell
himself might take the crown. These insinuations had their own impact on the Royalist frame of mind. There was a divinity which hedged a king, a divinity which had so far hedged King Charles
II
in so far as it hedged anyone at all. The reasons given to Cromwell for taking one further step, and accepting the royal title, demonstrated that. The people of England knew their duty to a King and he to them, so ran one argument. Obviously what King Oliver
I
would gain, King Charles
II
must inevitably lose.