The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (31 page)

In twelve months Montrose with his little army, shifting in composition and never amounting to more than five thousand men, won seven battles. The last of these, at Kilsyth, made him master of Scotland. He planned to summon a free parliament and to lead an army into England to revive the King’s battered cause. But now the bubble burst. His army, after the manner of Highland armies, scattered. Alasdair led off his Macdonalds to pursue a private vendetta in the west – though he promised to return. Montrose, hoping to raise more troops in the Borders, had hardly begun the task when on 13 September 1645 he was surprised at Philiphaugh outside Selkirk by David Leslie at the head of a battle-hardened force of some six thousand men. Montrose had perhaps a quarter that number and his little army was scattered. He escaped to the Highlands, while the Covenanters honoured their grim God Jehovah by slaughtering three hundred Irishwomen who had been among Montrose’s camp followers. ‘The lord’s work gangs merrily on,’ said one minister of the Kirk. Even Leslie, with his experience of the frightful German wars, was disgusted. ‘Have you not had your fill of blood?’ he asked another of the ministers. The answer was no.

With Montrose’s defeat the last hope vanished. There was little left of the royalists as a fighting force. Rupert went into exile, acquired a few ships, and harried the parliamentary fleet as vigorously as he had led cavalry charges. But this was more like piracy than war. In May 1646 Charles rode out of Oxford in disguise and made his way to Newark, where the castle, still held for the King, was being besieged by the Scots army commanded by Leven since David Leslie’s return north. Charles rode into the Scots’ camp and surrendered his person, then ordered the garrison of the castle to open the gates. It was the end of the war.

Charles was in effect a prisoner, but he was still king, and treated as such. Throughout the war his enemies had maintained that they were acting in the real interest of the Crown (which Charles mysteriously failed to understand) as well as the country, and Parliament had refrained from giving the title of acts to the measures it had passed, for an act required the royal assent. Instead they had issued what they called ‘ordinances of the two houses’. As for the Scots, in whose camp Charles would remain for six months, the affairs of Scotland had been settled to their satisfaction in 1641 when the bishops had been removed and the Presbyterian establishment confirmed. They had entered the war as allies of Parliament because they feared that a royalist victory would see the 1641 settlement overturned again. But there was no danger of that now that the King was beaten. Still, they weren’t satisfied. The Solemn League and Covenant had, as they believed, promised that Presbyterianism would be established in England too, and this they regarded as a guarantee that there could be no repeat of the Laudian experiment in Scotland. There should be two kingdoms, but the same style of Church government in each. Their hope remained wildly unrealistic, for the New Model Army of Fairfax and Cromwell continued to consist mainly of Independents. The Scots held the King as a valuable bargaining chip, but they were pursuing a chimera in their insistence that the provisions of their agreement with the English parliament should be enacted. To their mind, indeed, the Covenant was first with God, only secondly with Englishmen. As for the Independents, they were as loathsome to the Kirk as were bishops, for their demands would lead to what the ministers of the Kirk elegantly denounced as ‘the vomit of toleration’.

The King endured boredom in the Scots camp, being plagued by lengthy prayers and sermons from the ministers; boredom and loneliness, for he had not seen his adored wife since she departed for France two years ago, was deprived of his children, and surrounded by men he regarded with dislike and suspicion. Nevertheless, he had no cause to despair. The inability of his enemies to come to an agreement offered him an opportunity and reinforced his belief that he was indispensable to any settlement.

The Scots were the first to have had enough. Despairing of achieving their ends, they came to an agreement with Parliament. In return for £400,000 – money they were due under the terms of the Solemn League – they handed Charles over and turned their faces to the north, stipulating only that no harm should come to the King’s person. Parliamentary commissioners now took charge of the King and escorted him to Holdenby House in Northamptonshire. Crowds are reported to have cheered him as he passed, further evidence to his mind that no settlement of the divided and war-ravaged state could be made without him.

Parliament and the army were now at odds. The soldiers had many grievances. Their pay was in arrears. There were unwelcome proposals to disband some units and send others to Ireland, where the Catholic rebellion of 1641 had never been effectively suppressed. Yet there was also a difference, and point of disagreement, that ran deeper than these grievances; it was to prove an insuperable obstacle to any constitutional settlement. The Presbyterians were in the majority in Parliament; in the army the Independents. So though Parliament held what was recognised as the chief card – the person of the King – it was one that proved incapable of being a winning one. This soon became evident. Parliament proposed a compromise to the King. Let Presbyterianism be established for a trial period, followed by a general settlement agreeable to all. The idea of a trial period had been anathema to the Scots; how could you make a mere experiment of what God had ordained? The bare suggestion was anathema to the Independents of the army. Charles at least gave the matter his consideration, partly because Henrietta Maria was urging him to agree to it in letters from France. Her father, Henry of Navarre, had converted from Protestantism to Catholicism to end the religious wars that had plagued France for thirty years. Paris, he had decided, was worth a Mass. Surely Charles could be as accommodating?

While he temporised, Cromwell acted. On the last day of May 1647 he dispatched an officer, Cornet Joyce, to Holdenby House to seize the King. When Charles asked the cornet for his warrant, Joyce pointed to the five hundred troopers drawn up in the courtyard. The King, with the calm dignity that never deserted him, smiled and said, ‘Indeed it is one that I can read without spelling. As handsome and proper a company of gentlemen as I have seen this many a day’,
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and was led off to Newmarket, where he was received with courtesy by the army commanders. Fairfax kissed his hand and allowed his (Anglican) chaplains to return. Cromwell, in benign mood, declared that the King was the most upright and conscientious man in his three kingdoms.

Charles was now brought to Hampton Court and presented with new proposals, drawn up by Cromwell’s son-in-law, General Ireton. On the ecclesiastical side these were moderate and sensible. Indeed, they anticipated the solution to the problem of the contending parties that would eventually be reached almost half a century later. All three – Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Independents – should be allowed to go their own way, with no compulsion. The Church of England might be governed by bishops, Presbyterians might have their own church courts, and Independents should be free from the government of either. Charles was disposed to agree, if without sincere conviction. It might be the best deal obtainable. He recommended the document to Parliament, but Parliament – or what was left of it – said no and the army was even more hostile. Ireton and Cromwell had miscalculated.

At a general council of officers and men, one trooper, by name Sexby, expressed the soldiers’ frustration:

We sought to satisfy all men. We have laboured to please a King, and, unless we cut our own throats, I think we shall never please him…And one thing I must say to General Cromwell and General Ireton themselves. Your credit and reputation hath been much blasted upon two accounts – your dealings with the King, your plan of settlement which was to have satisfied everybody and has satisfied nobody, and your dealings with Parliament. The authority of Parliament is a thing which most here would give their lives for, but the Parliament to which we could loyally subject ourselves has still to be called.
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This was the language of social and political revolution. It alarmed Cromwell, who nevertheless recognised the strength of feeling and tacked towards it. It alarmed the King, who now concluded that negotiations with the army leaders were futile, since they could not deliver on any agreement acceptable to him. He was heard to say, ‘I really do believe we shall have another war.’

Then, in November 1647, the King was warned of a plot to assassinate him. He slipped out of Hampton Court, where he was only lightly guarded, and having crossed the river at Thames Ditton rode south and reached the Isle of Wight, where he found refuge in Carisbrooke Castle. From there he could probably have escaped to France, but at some point he had given his parole, and the man accused by his enemies of having so often deceived them and gone back on an agreement would not break his word now, when he thought his honour was at stake.

He lived comfortably enough and in relative freedom at Carisbrooke, still convinced, perhaps more than ever, that the division among his enemies meant that no settlement was possible without his approval. He wrote to the remnant of the House of Lords, justifying his flight from Hampton Court: ‘I appeal to all indifferent men to judge, if I have not just cause to free myself from the hands of those who change their principles with their condition and with whom the Levellers’ doctrine [of social, religious and political revolution] is rather countenanced than punished?’
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This was a barb aimed at Cromwell.

Not content with having thus alienated the most powerful man in his kingdom, Charles now committed an act of supreme folly.

There had been a change of mood in Scotland. Hamilton, now a duke, was back in the country, and had been forming a party of those who favoured the Covenant, were opposed to Cromwell and the Independents, and supported both the principle of monarchy and, albeit with reservations, Charles himself. Emissaries were sent to meet the King in the Isle of Wight, and entered into what was called an ‘Engagement’ with him. According to this document Charles agreed to a three-year trial of Presbyterianism in England, in return for which the Scottish Estates (or Parliament) would approve the raising of an army to rescue him from the captivity into which they had sold him eighteen months ago. It was a preposterous scheme, doomed from its inception, for it combined incompatibles – the Solemn League and the King – and had nothing in it to appeal to English royalists, for, as Edward Hyde was to put it in his
History of the Great Rebellion
, Charles had made ‘so many monstrous concessions that, unless the whole kingdom of England had been imprisoned in Carisbrooke Castle with the king, it could not be imagined that it could be delivered’.
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And delivered it was not. The second civil war in the autumn of 1648 was a brief but bloody affair. The Scots army was defeated and destroyed at Preston. In Scotland the extreme Covenanters, led by Argyll, regained the momentum from the discredited ‘Engagers’, and Cromwell went north to Edinburgh to ensure that even the lukewarm royalism of the Engagers should be extinguished. (One minister of the Kirk, Mr Robert Blair, found him ‘an egregious dissembler, a great liar and a greeting [weeping] deevil’.
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) The King’s involvement with the ill-conceived Engagement had done for him. Cromwell now agreed with the extremists that Charles should be put on trial for his life, though Fairfax said that if he was killed, then the rights of the Crown must pass to someone else, and asked who that might be.

It was necessary first to subdue what remained of the parliament elected in 1640, and remove those members who were regarded as unsound. On 6 December 1648, Colonel Pride purged the Commons by expelling its Presbyterian majority, reducing it to a rump of some eighty members. The civil war, which had been provoked by the Commons’ attempt to transfer the power of the prerogative from King to Parliament, had ended in the destruction of the institution of Parliament itself. Now it would be the turn of the King. ‘We shall cut his head off with the Crown still on it,’ Cromwell said.
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Charles, brought first to Hurst Castle, and then to Windsor, where he spent Christmas, still insisting on his kingly state, and still indeed being treated as a king, did not even now realise what was being planned. He feared assassination, but did not contemplate a trial. This was not surprising, for such an act was unprecedented. Kings of England had been murdered, deposed, compelled to abdicate, but never arraigned before a court to face a capital charge.

There was another difference. In these earlier cases – Edward II, Richard II, Henry VI – the men who removed the king or compelled him to surrender his throne were themselves either royal or great and powerful barons. Charles was on the point of being judged and found guilty ‘as a tyrant, murderer, and a public and implacable enemy of the Commonwealth of England’ by men who before the war had been of little standing: country squires and lawyers. It was a revolutionary tribunal before which the King was to be tried. Nothing like it had been seen in England before.

Even so, while his condemnation was all but certain, sentence of death was not. There was uncertainty among his judges. Cromwell himself, despite that expressed intention to cut the King’s head off with the crown still upon it, seems to have swithered. In a debate in the rump of the Parliament in the last days of December he said: ‘If any man whatsoever had carried on this design of deposing the King, and disinheriting his posterity or if any man had yet such a design, he should be the greatest traitor and rebel in the world. But since the Providence of God hath cast this upon us, I cannot but submit to Providence, though I am not yet provided to give you my advice.’
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This was characteristically ambiguous. But on one reading at least it implied that Charles, who claimed to be king by divine right, was to be deposed by the will of the Almighty, whose mere instrument Cromwell believed himself to be. Nevertheless, there might yet be a last-minute settlement. It would depend on how the King conducted himself and, importantly, on whether he recognised the authority of the court to try him.