King Charles II (8 page)

Now he would leave the parental and gubernatorial restraints of the university town, melancholy under its mantle of rain. Charles would never see his father again. But of that, as of the other griefs which lay ahead, the new General of the Western Association was fortunately unaware.

1
Political nomenclature is a perpetual headache in this period, when words such as ‘opposition’, ‘party’ and ‘minister’ did not bear the easily identifiable meanings they have since acquired. For example, since it was officially treason to oppose the King, there could be no official opposition as there is today. Nevertheless, it is impossible to avoid the language of one’s own time altogether.

2
It was, nonetheless, a match of vast consequence for the future of the House of Stuart, since from the marriage issued a son, half Orange and half Stuart – the future William
III
.

3
At the sale of Charles
I
’s belongings, this armour was purchased by Edward Annesley, Keeper of the Stores at the Tower of London: it is still to be seen there today. There are also two sets of small bronze cannons, bearing his mark as Prince of Wales; these were made pre-war.
⁷

‘We have so deep a sense of the present miseries and calamities of this kingdom, that there is nothing that we more earnestly pray to Almighty God than that He would be pleased to restore unto it a happy peace.’

I
t was the King’s intention, which seemed feasible from Oxford, that Charles should remain in safety in Bristol. Having been set up as a puppet commander, he should continue to act as such. The puppet master was to be Sir Edward Hyde.

Reality was very different. Once the Prince of Wales reached the West, he was the target of all the complaints and hopeful suggestions of the western gentry, who simply could not believe that his presence would not of itself bring some solution to their problems. These problems were demonstrable.

‘I expect nothing but ill from the West,’ wrote Prince Rupert gloomily on 24 March, a week after the arrival of the Prince of Wales; ‘Let them hear that Rupert says so.’
¹

It was an understandable point of view. The western gentry had made many loyal promises since the inception of the Civil War but had in fact raised neither men nor money. Now everyone was blaming everyone else for this unhappy state of affairs. Furthermore the two leading commanders in the West, Sir Richard Grenville and Sir John Berkeley, would neither of them agree to take orders from the other; even more unhelpfully, they both persisted in asserting their independence of the Royalist general George, Lord Goring.

Goring’s impossibly capricious personality was partly to blame. His high-handed behaviour at Marston Moor the year before had contributed to the defeat of his own side. He was now drinking heavily. As for Grenville, he was enormously quarrelsome. His recent campaign, which he had conducted under the title of the King’s General in the West, had also been inglorious. It only made matters worse that Grenville had probably enriched himself personally. Matters came to a head when he first refused to come to Goring’s aid at Taunton in March, then proved most uncooperative when he did arrive. The combination of Goring and Grenville was a nasty one.

Into this hornets’ nest stepped the Prince of Wales and his Council. In spite of Grenville’s record – and in spite of the fact that he had also recently been wounded – the Council immediately appointed him as commander of the new army of the Western Association.

It was probably a blunder in the first place, although Grenville did at least show himself a stern disciplinarian towards his own troops, and had the advantage of being a proper Cornishman. But the mistake was rendered fatal when the King immediately wrote off from Oxford nullifying the appointment and setting up Goring instead. Throughout the summer the rival commanders battled for the acknowledgement of their claims.

The authority of Prince Rupert – the one man in the West who could have imposed some kind of unified command – was unintentionally undermined by the presence of the Prince of Wales and his Council, since many of the western gentry preferred to address themselves to this gentler fount of authority.

The character of Charles’ puppet master, Sir Edward Hyde, also came into further prominence in the West. Hyde, later Earl of Clarendon, is a central figure in the story of Charles, in youth, early manhood and the first years of his restored kingship. The relationship drew to a close nearly twenty-five years after this western foray. It ended with Clarendon telling a middle-aged monarch ‘twenty times a day’ that he was lazy and not fit to govern.
²
It ended with an ageing statesman dismissed by an apparently ungrateful king. There are many comparisons to be made for the dismissal of an old friend and servant by his
ascendant master, of which the most famous is that of Falstaff and Prince Hal. All these comparisons are unflattering to the master. It is worth noticing that, in the case of Charles and Hyde, part of the trouble between them existed from the first and was temperamental.

The temperament concerned was that of Hyde rather than Charles.

Sir Edward Hyde, with his neat little mouth and sharp straight nose, his upright Anglicanism, his unwavering political principles in a wavering age, was a man for whom the phrase ‘generation gap’ might actually have been invented. A world of experience separated him from his young charge, a fact he never attempted to conceal. He was in his thirties when he went to Bristol, over twenty years older than Charles. In Hyde’s case they had been a long and active twenty years. Hyde was constitutionally incapable of playing the tolerant old retainer, the Colonel Sapp to Charles’ King Rudolf of Ruritania. Besides, Hyde was not an old retainer: he was a brilliant and shrewd statesman; he did not exactly expect to find old heads on young shoulders, but he did expect those young shoulders to bow before the weight of advice given by the old on all occasions.

Originally a lawyer, in 1640 Hyde was to be found attacking prerogative courts, royal judges and Laudian bishops. He even voted for Strafford’s attainder. Later Hyde became an advocate for a new kind of Royalism, based on an Anglican Church, both liberated and strengthened, and as such was transformed into not only a defender but also a firm friend of King Charles
I
. Throughout the difficult days of 1642 Hyde had constantly pressed the King to base his claim on those ancient rights which were his under the law; this would have the effect of emphasizing that it was Parliament, not the King, which represented a new type of arbitrary tyranny. Hyde’s reliance on purely constitutional expedients from the first distinguished him from another whole section of the King’s advisers, headed by his wife, who could not see the use of appealing to the law of the land, when they regarded the King himself as embodying this law.
Rex est lex
– as one saying had it.

This rift in royal circles widened into a chasm as the war
proceeded. Hyde, for example, had been instrumental in persuading the King to summon his Oxford Parliament. But naturally the legal-minded Hyde disapproved of his master’s delicate secret negotiations with his Irish supporters: he foresaw correctly the danger to the King’s reputation if they were uncovered. It was as much to take Hyde’s keen nose off the scent of this correspondence as to safeguard his son that the King despatched his wise counsellor to Bristol.

Hyde therefore viewed himself as one deputed to supervise – and, where necessary, restrict – the young Prince of Wales. He was a man of extreme gravity of character even in his younger years, the sort of gravity which is quickly taken for pomposity by the young. Charles on the other hand was being encouraged to see himself as having a useful and expanding role to play. Hyde liked to guide by disapproval; Charles liked to learn by encouragement: it was never an ideal combination. From the first Hyde was not sufficiently tolerant, Charles not sufficiently appreciative. By April Charles was said by Hyde (in his later
History
) to be encouraging disrespect towards his Council at Bridgwater.
³
But it was neither necessary nor politic to try and swaddle the Prince for ever.

Some of Hyde’s disapproval was certainly incurred by another fairly natural piece of youthful folly. In Bridgwater Charles encountered once more his former nurse, Mrs Christabella Wyndham, wife of the governor of the town. On the Continent Queen Henrietta Maria dangled the hand of her eldest son in marriage as a bait to raise money, now that her jewels were in danger of running out. Louise Henrietta, eldest daughter of the Prince of Orange (Mary’s sister-in-law), was offered this fine prospect in return for Dutch money, but her father declined the honour. Earlier there had been plans to marry Charles to the wealthy Infanta Joanna of Portugal, or to the daughter of the Duc d’Orléans, the super-rich Anne-Marie Louise de Montpensier, known to history as La Grande Mademoiselle. But in the West Country Charles was showing more interest in sex than in marriage.

To Mrs Wyndham, in Bridgwater, should probably be accorded the honour of having seduced her former nurseling,
the Prince of Wales. By the sexual standards of the time, to play such a gracious role in the life of a young prince was more of a privilege than an offence, as Madame de Beauvais played it for Louis
XIV
. Charles was nearly fifteen. Certainly by the time of his arrival in Jersey a year later he was a fully fledged man in the physical sense, capable of a proper love affair. That was not particularly precocious. In an age when princes were frequently married off before they reached their teens, early sexual maturity was desirable rather than the reverse.

In some ways Mrs Wyndham, ‘a celebrated beauty and an opulent heiress’, was a suitable choice.
⁴
Where Mrs Wyndham did overstep the mark, according to contemporary
mores
, was by showing gross familiarity to the Prince of Wales in public, including such spontaneous gestures as diving across a room and covering his face with kisses. In doing so, she greatly shocked and annoyed Hyde, who wrote about the whole episode quite lewdly in his
History
;
⁵
the simple act of seduction accomplished in private, might, one feels, have been discreetly glossed over. Furthermore Mrs Wyndham, in Hyde’s view, distracted Charles from the conduct of his own business.

Complaints concerning Charles and his work are to be reiterated down the decades and Hyde is very often to be the source of the complaint. In his view Charles had hitherto been ‘very little conversant with business, nor spent his time so well towards the improvement of his mind and understanding as might have been expected from his years and fortune’ – a somewhat sour comment in view of the wartime conditions in which the Prince had been raised. Yet Charles did apply himself, as even Hyde admitted, ‘with great ingenuity’ to the affairs of the Council. Now Mrs Wyndham, besides her public fondlings, was also guilty of playing on Charles’ affections in order to affect Council proceedings. It was her influence, wrote Hyde, that persuaded two members of the Prince’s entourage, Sir Charles Berkeley and Robert Long, to demand to join the Council proper – positions to which they had no right because it was actually the King’s Council (in the West) not the Prince’s.
⁶

So the petty feuds proliferated.

Elsewhere in England a revolutionary war machine, the New
Model Army, was being assembled by the King’s enemies. Charles in the West devoured local specialities, such as cherry pie and cream, with relish; he also struggled to play some kind of useful political part, for all Hyde’s strictures, in a situation which was rapidly becoming swamped by the rising tide of Royalist failure. At Bridgwater on 2 June he received a petition from that strange body of protesters known as the Clubmen. The aims of the Clubmen were out of the mainstream of the time: wishing to live in peace in their lands, but sometimes using force to bring about peace, they suffered at the hands of both Royalists and Roundheads. On this occasion they were petitioning against the ‘intolerable rapine’ committed against them by Goring’s horse.

Charles on his own initiative behaved with both sympathy and wisdom. He wrote a shocked letter to Goring. He also tried to persuade the Clubmen not to take the law into their own hands.

On 14 June the New Model Army clashed with the King at Naseby, in Northamptonshire: this, their paramount victory, extinguished his military hopes. Not only that, but the King’s secret papers, revealing his ‘treacherous’ Irish dealings, were discovered. For all the successes of Montrose in Scotland, the Royalist cause in England was virtually lost. A month later, to complete the pattern of disaster, Goring, that bird of ill omen, was totally defeated by Fairfax and the New Model Army at Langport not far from Bridgwater.

The Prince by this time had moved back to Bristol, and then after an outbreak of plague out again to ‘fine sweet’ Barnstaple. But he was clearly no longer as safe as he had formerly been in the West. He wrote an official letter to the Parliamentary general Sir Thomas Fairfax: ‘We have so deep a sense of the present miseries and calamities of this kingdom, that there is nothing that we more earnestly pray to Almighty God than that He would be pleased to restore unto it a happy peace.’
⁷
But at this stage there was very little that anyone on the Royalist side, let alone a fifteen-year-old prince, could do. Once Prince Rupert had surrendered Bristol after a fierce siege, the question was not so much whether the Prince of Wales should be evacuated, but
when he should go. Above all, it had to be resolved in which country he should take refuge.