The White King

by Leanda de Lisle

  MPs who had abstained from the attainder bill against Strafford were publicly named and shamed, with news-sheets and pamphlets driving the verbal assaults on them as ‘enemies of their country’.17 They were also abused by the crowds that filled New Palace Yard, and peers, who had yet to take their final vote, had to push their way through men chanting at them ‘Justice! Justice!’, and ‘with great rudeness and insolence pressing upon those lords whom they suspected not to favour the bill’.18 Attendance in the Lords dropped from seventy peers to around forty-five. Catholic peers in particular kept away, unwilling to sign the protestation and fearful of ‘having their brains beaten out’ if they voted against the attainder.19

  On Saturday 8 May the attainder passed its third reading, leaving Charles confronted with the decision of whether or not to give his assent to Strafford’s death. He could hear the baying of a crowd of around 12,000 men and women pressing at Whitehall Palace’s gate, threatening his life and that of ‘all the royal house’.20 It was too late to send his family away. The French ambassador had warned Henrietta Maria that the roads were now too dangerous.

  The Bishop of Lincoln, John Williams, assured Charles that in signing Strafford’s attainder his ‘public conscience as a king might… oblige him to do that which was against his private conscience as a man’, in order to ‘preserve his kingdom… his wife… his children’.21 In Christian religious teaching governments have the right to do what individuals do not, such as executing a guilty criminal, when the public good demands it. But the key word here is ‘guilty’. Charles did not believe Strafford was guilty. Strafford himself, however, wrote urging Charles to sign his death warrant as the price of the public good, and the preservation of the kingdom.

  The next day, Sunday–a week after Mary’s wedding–Charles Louis saw his uncle the king break down in tears at the council table as he struggled with his decision. Come the evening, outside the Tower, another violent crowd had to be subdued by rifle fire, leaving three dead. Charles’s fears for his people and his family sapped at his resolution to hold firm; at nine that night it broke, and he signed the attainder. Charles said if it was only his life at risk he would ‘gladly venture it’ to save Strafford, but ‘seeing his wife, children and all his kingdom was concerned in it, he was forced to give way’.22 ‘In this he showed himself a good Master, a good Christian and at last a good king,’ Charles Louis wrote to his mother Elizabeth, with smug satisfaction.23

  The only hope left to Charles was that the Lords could yet be persuaded to show Strafford mercy. On 11 May, the day before the execution was due to take place, Charles sent his eldest son to plead that Strafford’s beheading be commuted to life imprisonment. The prince entered the Lords Chamber and duly delivered the message on which a man’s life depended. These were his father’s ‘natural counsellors’ and Charles informed them he had sent his son as the person ‘that of all your House is most dear to me’ to ask them to accept his plea for mercy. To one Royalist, looking back, this ‘strange submission of himself to the power and courtesy of his people’ amounted merely to a diminishment of majesty.24 Charles had humbled himself–and to no avail. The reply, delivered to Charles later that day, denied mercy on the grounds that sparing Strafford’s life could not be achieved ‘without evident danger to [the king] himself, his dearest consort the queen, and all the young princes, their children’.25 Strafford’s fate was sealed.

  ‘I was persuaded by those that I think wished me well, to choose rather what was safe than what was just,’ Charles later recalled.26 Strafford’s blood was now on his hands. He would never forgive himself.

  Strafford sent a message to his fourteen-year-old son, William. They were ‘the last lines you are ever to receive from a father that tenderly loves you’, he wrote. He sent blessings for his daughters and asked his son to care for them, along with the boy’s stepmother.

  On Tower Hill, where the scaffold was built, the crowds began gathering before dawn. When the sun came up on 12 May it was estimated 100,000 or more had flocked to witness Strafford’s death. The Lieutenant of the Tower feared his prisoner would be lynched on the walk from the Tower gates to the Hill and so Strafford was given a military escort. Spectators were perched on the tiered benches of the grandstands like birds on the branches of a great tree. From up on high they watched Strafford, a figure in black, moving on the scaffold, speaking, praying. When he lay prostrate on the block he vanished from the view of those on the lower stands. Then the axe was swung, his fallen head was raised up for all to see, and in the shadow of the Tower the spring morning rang with the ugly song of their cheers.

  13

  ‘THAT SEA OF BLOOD’

  EDINBURGH WAS A BEAUTIFUL, IF SMALL, CITY, ‘HIGH-SEATED, IN A fruitful soil and wholesome air’.1 With building restricted by defensive walls built to keep English invaders out, and the population growing, many of its houses were very tall–some eleven to fourteen storeys high. This gave a sense of an enclosed space along the high street where on 17 August 1641 Charles was processed in scarlet and ermine to the Parliament House. Newly built, it was a fine building with a hammer-beam roof, by the Kirk of St Giles. Charles’s crown was carried before him in a display of majesty. Yet he was a defeated king at the mercy of his Scottish subjects. The treaty he signed eight days later gave the Covenanters almost everything they wanted in exchange for the withdrawal of Scottish forces from England.2 Charles planned, nevertheless, to win back what he had lost. He would deal with the Scots once he had regained the upper hand in England. There the Junto’s position was, at last, weakening.

  People were becoming increasingly alive to the dangers the Junto now posed both to national stability and to the traditions of the Church of England. Warwick, Saye and Sele, Brooke, Essex, Pym and the rest claimed to be the protectors of the law against the king’s arbitrary rule. Yet they had encouraged violent demonstrations not only in London, but also in the provinces, where Puritan mobs were vandalising local churches. The Church of England also faced a new threat from the radical and formerly clandestine congregations, run by extreme Puritans known as the ‘sectaries’. To many who had sought a conservative reaction to Charles’s political and religious innovations, the Junto were proving even worse: a ‘pack of half-witted lords’ using the sects to ‘stir up sedition’ and get rid of ‘all reverend ministers’.3

  In September the Junto attempted to regain control of the iconoclastic attacks on churches by issuing orders through Parliament for an orderly destruction of images and altar rails. This, however, provoked fury in those parishes that did not share their distaste for religious art. At Kidderminster in the west Midlands, ‘the poor journeymen and servants’ ran ’together with weapons to defend the crucifix and the church images’: a reminder that Charles’s reforms also had their supporters in the Church of England’s congregations.

  The Junto’s most potent means of uniting people behind them remained their insistence that there was a popish conspiracy from which only the Junto would protect them. To demonstrate their point they had driven Marie de’ Medici out of England. She had arrived in Dunkirk in June, diminished and seriously ill. The flamboyant former regent would not survive much more than a year, dying in Cologne in a house that had once belonged to Rubens and with her servants burning her furniture to keep her warm. Ordinary Catholics were now in the firing line, facing a persecution even many Protestants later judged to be of ‘preposterous rigour and unreasonable severity’.4 Orders had been issued for all priests to leave England. But at the centre of Catholic religious practice is the Mass, which cannot be performed without a priest: so several had stayed to serve their communities.

  The first execution was of an elderly scholar and priest called William Ward. Ward had failed to meet the deadline and was condemned under an Elizabethan law that made it treason simply to be a priest in England. He was hanged at Tyburn and, when almost dead, was cut down from the rope, dragged by his heels to the fire, his belly ripped open, his heart cut out and thrown into the flame
s. His head was then cut off, his body dismembered, and the parts placed on the gates of the city. He was eighty-one years old.

  The death warrants for a further seven priests had been drawn up and were awaiting Charles’s signature, for when he returned to London.

  Meanwhile, Charles’s family also remained under attack, with Henrietta Maria facing ‘disgraceful pasquinades’ posted up in London’s streets.5 Until the conclusion of Strafford’s trial she had been a vital intermediary between the king and the Junto, a role facilitated by her long-standing friendship with Holland, who was her high steward. But saving Strafford had been key to hopes of compromise and those hopes were now as dead as he was. The gloves were off in the Junto-led attacks on the queen. It was the traditional resort of the enemies of queens to question their chastity, and Henrietta Maria was accused of adultery with her favourite, Henry Jermyn. She felt, she confessed, ‘almost crazy with the sudden change in my fortunes’.6 She lost weight, and suffered headaches and cold sores, while her doctor dosed her with opium to help her sleep. And in that drug-induced slumber what dreams did come? Of the mobs at the palace gate that May, of the old priests screaming as their guts were torn out, or of a time long ago, when she was carried as a baby at the funeral of her murdered father?

  The ailing queen had asked Parliament for permission to escort the Princess Royal to Holland, so she might visit spas for her health. Secretly she also hoped to raise money in Europe for Charles. She had, however, been denied a passport and was instead assured that everything possible would be done to ease her stress. ‘I give many thanks to both Houses of Parliament for their care of my health,’ she replied sarcastically. ‘I hope I shall see the effect of it.’7 Since she could not now help Charles from Europe, she agreed with him to do what she could from home. In the 1630s Henrietta Maria could afford to think ‘little of the future, trusting entirely in the king’.8 Now with his Privy Council packed with members of the Junto, Charles needed someone close to him he could trust and could play a political role.

  Charles had told his acting Secretary of State in England, Edward Nicholas, to consult Henrietta Maria while he was in Scotland, explaining that she had been thoroughly briefed and ‘knows my mind fully’.9 He was writing to her from Edinburgh at least three times a week when, on 23 October, just two months after he had signed the peace treaty with the Scots, shattering news arrived of a rising in his third kingdom: Ireland.

  From across the sea, Irish Catholics had looked on, appalled, at what was happening to their English co-religionists. It seemed only a matter of time before they faced something still worse–genocide. These fears were justified. The confederal arrangement the Scots sought with the English was designed to support a military agenda against Irish Catholics, and there had already been leading English advocates of genocide as a legitimate tool of colonial conquest there.*

  The Irish declared theirs a Royalist rebellion: ‘to vindicate the honour of our sovereign, assure the liberty of our consciences, and preserve the freedom of this kingdom under his sacred Majesty’.10 But their ‘liberty of conscience’ and ‘freedom’ represented, on the contrary, a challenge to royal authority. The aim of the rebels was to force Charles to grant them the same degree of religious autonomy, and the same political rights, that he had given the Scots. But Charles would never permit Catholics the free practice of their religion on equal terms with the Church of England. On this one matter Charles and the Junto were agreed: England needed to raise an army to bring Ireland under control.

  In Ulster, Protestant settlers were now being stabbed, hanged and burned in their homes by native neighbours they had known for years. Often the Catholic Irish humiliated their victims by stripping off their clothes, and then leaving them exposed to the elements in the unusually bitter weather of that winter. An English sailor described how his own little daughter, naked and freezing, had tried to comfort her shivering parents, insisting ‘she was not cold nor would cry’. She died of hypothermia that night. The parents only saved their four other children by finding shelter in ‘a poor shack’ and lying naked on top of them ‘to keep them in heat and save them alive’.11

  The colonial administration’s reaction to the rebellion was equally savage. In Munster 200 Catholics prisoners were hanged without trial ‘for terror’, while in Leinster, Catholics were simply murdered in their beds. Soldiers were actively encouraged to target women, ‘being manifestly very deep in the guilt of this rebellion’.12 ‘Our men burned the house, killed a woman or two, marched on,’ noted the diary of one English officer with indifferent brutality.13

  Charles called the Irish rebellion ‘that sea of blood’. For the Junto, however, it represented a powerful propaganda tool: it made the dangers of Catholic conspiracy real. Although the truth was terrible enough, the Junto and their allies exaggerated the stories of atrocities against settlers to help push through Parliament ever more radical means of reducing Charles’s powers. There had been a brief flash of royal teeth on 12 October when a plot was uncovered to arrest (and possibly kill) leading Covenanters in Edinburgh after luring them to Holyrood Palace. Charles denied any foreknowledge of this ‘incident’, as it became known, but he was not believed. It had involved his childhood friend William Murray and was all too reminiscent of the army plots in England earlier that summer. This ‘incident’ and its potentially murderous consequences were a terrifying reminder to the Junto of their likely fate if they failed to coerce the king successfully.

  The Junto’s principal concern now was that they control the army that would have to be raised to crush the Irish rebellion. Traditionally armies were raised in the name of the king. That had to be prevented if they were to ensure that Charles could not then turn the army against them.

  As the Junto plotted their next moves, they met at Henry Holland’s house in Kensington. Built by Inigo Jones, it was hung with no less than five fabulously expensive Mortlake tapestries, as well as other works of art: an exquisite place for what was often almost a family gathering. Along with Holland’s privateering brother Warwick and their dour soldiering cousin Essex was their mutual cousin, the lovely Lucy Carlisle. It was said that since Strafford’s demise she had taken a new gallant in Pym and become a Puritan ‘she saint’. She was even seen taking notes during sermons.14 Yet she also remained close to the queen.

  Lucy was a spy, although for which side was yet to emerge.

  Holland, on the other hand, was certainly not the royal favourite he had once been. He had been moving closer to his brother’s position since the dissolution of the Short Parliament, and the offices and grants on which Holland relied for the bulk of his income, and which were in the gift of the king, were now under threat–at least until the Junto deprived Charles of his powers of appointment, as they intended to do. Others were also calculating that Charles could no longer afford to reward great servants: Lucy’s brother, Northumberland, amongst them.15 It would be unfair, though, to suggest that Holland’s decision to move against the king was wholly about money. He was an anti-papist ‘very much by my breeding’, as he himself noted. The Irish rebellion had given him a final push to align with the most ruthless opponents of the rebels–the Junto.

  The planned means of attack on the king in Parliament was that form of protest document known as a Remonstrance. This, however, was to be a Grand Remonstrance, listing over 200 individual acts of ‘misgovernment’. It was designed to show that religion, liberties and law were intertwined and, as such, they had to be defended together against a popish plan to destroy Protestantism. The ‘actors and promoters’ of this supposed Jesuitical threat included the Church of England’s own bishops, ‘along with the corrupt part of the clergy who cherish formality and superstition’.16 Once passed by MPs the Grand Remonstrance would be published, so allowing the Junto to go straight to a thoroughly alarmed people with the programme they intended: the removal from the Lords of all bishops and Catholics, a vigorously Calvinist reform of the Church of England, and the employment only of royal councillor
s approved by Parliament.

  Henrietta Maria was under no illusion what the Irish rebellion would mean for her. Already, in November, she was named as a suspect in encouraging the revolt in Ireland and blamed for the deaths of Protestant settlers. She knew too that this would be used against her husband. With the family facing such dangers the best she could do in the short term was to try to smuggle his senior heirs–the Prince of Wales, and James, Duke of York–out of the country. To this end she had the boys brought the eight miles from their residence at Richmond Palace to where she was at Oatlands Palace in Surrey. The Junto promptly dispatched Holland to tell her to return them to their governors.

  Holland framed the Junto’s demands politely, in terms of their anxiety that the princes’ education would suffer if they missed their lessons. She did as she was asked, but her punishment for her attempt was swift.17 As the princes left Oatlands her priestly confessor–the man who acted as her spiritual guide and mentor–was taken away for interrogation concerning his ‘involvement’ in the Irish rising and also accused of attempts to convert the Prince of Wales. When the priest later refused to swear his answers on a Protestant Bible, he was placed in the Tower. His loss was a very personal blow to the queen, while the fate of the ordinary Catholics whose protection she saw as her responsibility was becoming ever more concerning. A proclamation had been issued demanding that all Catholics bring their names to Parliament: the assumption was that they would then be expelled from the country as the Jews had been in 1290, or at the very least lose their property.18

  Charles, however, had written to assure the queen that he was on his return journey from Scotland to London. He had left Edinburgh on 4 November and was already riding through the towns of northern England, where the streets were lined with cheering crowds and strewn with flowers: a reminder that the Junto only represented part of the nation. Together Charles and Henrietta Maria now plotted a strategy that was tried and tested in England: the king would make a spectacular entrance to London and woo the affections of his people, as the Tudors had done successfully in countering threats that they had faced from disaffected subjects.19 The royal fightback was about to begin.