The White King

by Leanda de Lisle

  The New Model Army’s leading generals were allied to Parliament’s Independents. They were also, however, racing to catch up with the radical mood of their men. The soldiers had been angered by their poor treatment at the hands of the Presbyterian party and the diversity that had once been a feature in their ranks had now ended, with Presbyterian officers, sympathisers and former Royalists driven out. Three days earlier, under Fairfax’s auspices, a General Council of the Army had begun drawing up a political programme. This council was made up of senior officers and elected representatives known as Adjutators, or Agitators. They included two officers from each regiment, and two from the ranks. On 14 June, a week after the generals had met the king, the council was ready to issue their public ‘Declaration’.

  ‘We were not a mere mercenary army, hired to serve any arbitrary power of a state,’ the army asserted. They were men ‘called forth and conjured by the several declarations of Parliament to the defence of our own and the people’s just rights and liberties’. Parliament had failed to secure those rights, and, in extremis, safety demanded that the army ‘would now proceed in our own and the kingdom’s behalf’. Parliament was to be purged of ‘corrupt’ members and set a date for its own dissolution. There would then be new and regular elections.2

  Almost certainly written by the army’s commissary general and chief penman Henry Ireton, who was Cromwell’s son-in-law, it both threatened Parliament (with a purge and dissolution), and offered to save the institution from itself (with new and regular elections).

  With this message delivered, the New Model Army moved their valuable prisoner nearer London.

  On 25 June Charles arrived at the Earl of Salisbury’s palace at Hatfield House, where he was to be allowed his own chaplains and use of the prayer book. On 3 July, he was moved again, to the house of the fabulously rich Lord Craven, at Caversham on the banks of the Thames. The following day, Charles had a further interview with Cromwell, this time without Fairfax.3

  The Puritan general was used to letting others talk so he could ‘know their inmost designs’. Charles was used to keeping his innermost designs to himself. He appeared to impress Cromwell, who assured one of the king’s servants that he thought Charles ‘the uprightest and most conscientious man of his three kingdoms’. But the army needed Charles’s goodwill to enable them to achieve the peace settlement they wanted.4 Cromwell therefore not only flattered Charles, he also promised him visits from his three children. At that Charles could not hide his delight.5 He hadn’t seen Elizabeth and Henry in five years.

  Charles left no record of his first impressions of Cromwell, but he wrote to James that same day, ‘I am in hope that you may be permitted, with your brother and sister, to come to some place betwixt this and London, where I may see you.’ He suggested James ask permission to come to him ‘for a night or two. But rather than not see you, I will be content that you come to some convenient place to dine, and go back again at night.’ He signed himself ‘your loving father’, adding as a postscript, ‘Send me word as soon as you can.’6

  An overnight visit was not permitted, but twelve days later the royal children were brought by carriage to the Greyhound Tavern in Caversham. Their father arrived under escort an hour later, at 11 a.m. Cromwell described the family reunion as ‘the tenderest sight that ever his eyes beheld’.7 The seven-year-old Henry, Duke of Gloucester, was bewildered, and when Charles asked, ‘Do you know me child?’ he answered, ‘No.’ ‘I am your father, child,’ Charles explained, ‘and it is not one of the least of my misfortunes that I have brought you and your brothers and sisters into this world to share my miseries.’8 James and Elizabeth then began to cry.

  Charles sat his younger children on his lap and comforted Elizabeth. She was now eleven and very changed from the energetic girl he remembered. She had broken her leg running across a room three years earlier. Having been confined inside for months she had begun to study. She could now read and write in French, knew some Italian, Latin, Greek and Hebrew. She had also become a girl ‘of great observation… both of things and persons’. Her captors called her ‘Temperance’, but she watched them and made her judgements.

  As the battle-scarred Fairfax entered the room, Elizabeth asked who he was. Charles had labelled Fairfax the rebels’ ‘brutish general’.9 But when Elizabeth was given Fairfax’s name she thanked him profusely for allowing her ‘the great happiness she enjoyed’ to see her ‘dear father’, and said she would return the favour, if ever she could.10

  Only Charles, however, was in a position to deliver what Fairfax wanted.

  The General Council of the Army was already drawing up a draft peace settlement with their Independent allies in Parliament. The terms of what was known as the Heads of Proposals proved to be very generous. Charles would get control of the militia and appoint his own councillors after ten years. They even allowed for the return of an episcopal church, so long as other Protestants were permitted to worship in their own way. To sweeten the deal further, the Independent-dominated Committee for the Revenue was using public money to bombard the king with luxury accessories, horses and clothing, painting themselves and their military friends as part of a loyal and generous court-in-waiting for the restored king.11

  Henrietta Maria, having lost confidence in the Scots, now wanted an accommodation made with the Independents as soon as possible. Many Royalists agreed.12 Charles, however, wondered what legal force any settlement with the army could have. As Charles reminded Cromwell, ‘the power of Parliament was the power by which [they] fought’.13 It seemed to him that his best hope remained in extracting more from the Presbyterians.

  In London the Presbyterian grandees, including Henry Holland, were meeting regularly in Lucy Carlisle’s rooms at Whitehall Palace, where they plotted how to get the king back in their hands.14 While the Royalist nobles had eked out the war years in cramped quarters in Oxford, Lucy Carlisle had continued a life of relative glamour and comfort in Parliamentarian London. Nevertheless, the echoing palace of Whitehall was not the same without the court. She also no more trusted the army with its radical rank and file than Holland did, and she had thrown herself instead into the Presbyterian cause, along with many other former adherents of their late cousin the Earl of Essex. They had powerful allies in the City, where Presbyterians continued to dominate municipal and church government.

  On 26 July 1647 the Presbyterians raised a huge mob of apprentices and disbanded soldiers who invaded Parliament. They ordered the Speaker to put to a vote an invitation for Charles to come to London to conclude a personal treaty. The terrified MPs obeyed while, in a grim farce of popular representative government, several of the mob joined in the voting.

  When the army formally presented their Heads of Proposals to Charles two days later, the king had heard that the City’s defences were being raised against the army, and that the Scots were now ready to fight for his restoration rather than see the Independents triumph. The army was on the back foot and Charles played hard ball. He outlined to the officers two main concerns. The first was to protect leading Royalists. He recalled the fate of the Earl of Strafford in ‘tart’ and ‘bitter’ language and said he ‘would have no man suffer for his sake’. His second concern was to have the Church of England re-established. The army needed him, Charles reminded them, ‘you cannot be without me. You will fall into ruin if I do not sustain you.’15

  Amongst the official army delegation to see Charles was a thirty-seven-year-old colonel called Thomas Rainborowe. He struck an unprepossessing figure, with his hat removed respectfully, and a few strands of fair hair hanging to his shoulders from his bald head. Born in Wapping, he had been a mariner in his youth and then a currant trader. He was now a firebrand leader of the army’s rank and file. For three hours Rainborowe joined other New Model officers in trying to persuade Charles to accept the Heads of Proposals. But he left the meeting early having concluded that it was time to force a settlement on the king.

  Charles’s immediate hopes of the London P
resbyterians proved misplaced. Political power by 1647 depended more than ever on military strength. On 6 August Fairfax marched his men into London. His battle-hardened 14,000-strong New Model Army had little trouble in intimidating 400,000 Londoners. Cromwell rode at the head of the cavalry while Fairfax sat in a carriage along with Mrs Cromwell. Presbyterian peers and many of their supporters now fled London, or were imprisoned. But Lucy Carlisle remained, still plotting against the army she despised.

  Fairfax and Cromwell now moved Charles still nearer London, to Hampton Court. They remained desperate for Charles to accept the Heads of Proposals and quickly, before radicals like Rainborowe demanded a thoroughgoing reform of the constitution, as well as the imposition of a settlement on the king. Soldiers were becoming subject to the influence of a movement within the London radicals soon to be known as the ‘Levellers’. The term had originated in peasant rebellions against the enclosure of common land earlier in the century and referred to the flattening of hedges. It was now being used to suggest a desire to flatten England’s political hierarchy. The Levellers hoped to see Parliament, king, legal and clerical establishments made subject to a new constitution that would be agreed to by all freeborn Englishmen.16 This excited considerable fear in the New Model Army’s leading generals and in the wider population, who equated democracy with mob rule.

  Plague had broken out in the stables at St James’s Palace, and the royal children were now moved to the Earl of Northumberland’s Syon House near Hampton Court.17 They continued to be brought regularly to see their father, and often ‘spent a long time in the garden, running and playing before the king’. At dinner James sat on Charles’s right, ‘His Majesty… loving to all the children’, and Elizabeth in particular was ‘often in his arms’.18

  We have a snapshot of Charles at this time in a double portrait commissioned by Northumberland from the artist Peter Lely. It depicts the teenage James, full-cheeked and dressed in silk, reaching out to his father, who looks prematurely old. An admirer of Lely’s thought the artist had caught perfectly the king’s ‘clouded Majesty’, Charles’s face showing ‘sorrow… without a tear’, and ‘humble bravery’.19 Charles still hoped to salvage from the peace what was most important to him–an episcopal Church of England, the lives of his friends, and the rights of his heirs to raise the militia, but it also seemed probable to him that he would be murdered first.

  When alone with his children, Charles reminded them of their religious and dynastic responsibilities in the event of his death. He told them to hold true to the Church of England and to be loyal to their eldest brother, Charles, Prince of Wales. He warned Elizabeth not to marry without the consent of the prince or that of her mother, Henrietta Maria. He asked James to escape to Holland, and told little Harry that if anything happened to Prince Charles then his loyalty must be to James, as the next in line.

  There was a prime example of family disloyalty in a less welcome visitor to Hampton Court. Charles’s eldest nephew, Charles Louis, the Prince Palatine, had returned to England in August 1644 to appeal to Parliament for the money with which Charles could no longer supply him. He had moved into lodgings at Whitehall and had signed the Covenant. His brothers Rupert and Maurice, who had fought for so long for the king, had been permitted to return to Europe. Charles Louis chose to remain and urged his uncle to compromise his terms. Charles snapped in reply that it seemed to him that Charles Louis would do anything, however base, ‘to have one chicken more’ on his dish.

  The strategy of holding out for better terms was going well. There were good reasons to believe that a new alliance between the three kingdoms in Charles’s support was becoming a real possibility. The military might and political power of the New Model Army, alongside the nationalistic imperialism of the Independents, were perceived in Scotland and Ireland as offering a dangerous new dimension to English dominance within the three kingdoms.

  The Scots also still feared that the influence of sectaries and other radicals in England threatened the stability of their Presbyterian kingdom. A new moderate group of Covenanters under the Duke of Hamilton, many of whom had opposed the intervention in England in 1644–6, had now taken control of the Edinburgh Parliament and they were prepared to reach terms with Charles without him having to sign the Covenant.

  In Ireland the heavy-handedness of officials employed by England’s Parliament was also producing a new coalition of Irish Presbyterians, Episcopalians and Catholics that could yet send an army to aid Charles. The king’s former Lord Lieutenant, the Calvinist James, Marquess of Ormonde, visited him at Hampton Court and was soon on his way to France to lay further plans.

  In England itself, meanwhile, the army and the taxation to sustain it were exciting growing anger amongst ordinary people, while the unity of the army itself was also crumbling.

  On 18 October 1647 radical-minded and Leveller-influenced soldiers published a new manifesto, entitled The Case of the Army Truly Stated. This document, which had not been agreed by either the Army Council or the leading generals, argued that a settlement should begin not by establishing the powers of Parliament, but with the people’s rights, which, it argued, each individual had from birth. The people therefore had the right to consent to those who represented them. The Case called for a widening of the electoral franchise, as well as biennial parliaments and the imposing on Charles of a peace settlement. Amongst the soldiers responsible was Colonel Rainborowe, whose experiences in trying to persuade Charles to accept the Heads of Proposals had convinced him that the king should have no further say in the terms for his restoration.

  Fairfax, Cromwell and Ireton all viewed the proposals outlined in the Case with horror. They did not believe people had any rights by nature, apart from the right to life. All political rights and liberties were established through Parliament, which had generated laws and customs over time. These had enabled men to hold property, and to enjoy the rights and privileges that stemmed from this. Amongst them was the right to vote, because in purchasing a ‘fixed interest’ in the kingdom through property ownership you bought into the nation’s customs and laws. Those without property were considered too easy to manipulate and too dangerously unpredictable to be enfranchised.20

  On 28 October the generals of the New Model Army confronted the radical agenda at the church of St Mary the Virgin, Putney. The Case of the Army Truly Stated was to be debated by the Army Council. This was, however, set aside when Agitators representing junior officers and the ranks read out a new document, The Agreement of the People.21 This called for the abolition of the House of Lords, and a written constitution with a parliamentary electorate ‘proportioned according to the number of inhabitants’. Rainborowe expressed its democratic views in ringing terms: ‘Really I think that the poorest he that is in England has a life to live [just] as the greatest he. And therefore, truly, sir, I think it is clear that every man who is to live under a government ought first by his counsel to put himself under that government.’

  Ireton replied with the warning that the Agreement would lead to anarchy and communism. If every man had a natural-born right to the vote then, Ireton observed, ‘by that same right, he has an equal right to any goods he sees: meat, drink, clothes, to take and use for his sustenance; he has a freedom to the land, to take the ground, to exercise it, till it; he has the same freedom to any thing’.22 A trooper, in turn, reminded the generals of the earlier Declaration of the Army Council on 14 June, and which had stated that they had fought ‘to the defence of our own and the people’s just rights and liberties’. He and his fellow soldiers ‘have engaged in this kingdom and ventured our lives, and it was all for this: to recover our birth rights and privileges as Englishmen’; yet, he noted, ‘It seems now, except a man has a fixed estate in this kingdom, he has no right in this kingdom. I wonder we were so much deceived.’23

  With the debates likely to raise fears of army radicalism across England, the generals imposed a news blackout. Even the internal records of the debates soon ceased. From what has su
rvived it seems a majority proved in favour of an extended suffrage, but that there was also agreement that a peace settlement must start with Parliament. The deepest divisions lay over whether to treat with the king, and on what basis. Some wanted to see the Lords and the monarchy abolished. The angriest called for ‘an immediate and exemplary justice on the chief delinquent’ of the civil war–the king.24 As the Putney debates came to an end, Cromwell and Fairfax demanded that every soldier sign a declaration of loyalty. This would include accepting the Heads of Proposals, and the terms it offered to the king, as the army’s manifesto.

  The army’s next general rendezvous, due to take place at Corkbush Field near Ware in Hertfordshire on 15 November, would be the key moment when Fairfax and Cromwell would discover whether or not they could rein in the Leveller-influenced minority in the army and so restore unity. Only if Fairfax and Cromwell prevailed would they be able to make good their promises to Charles. If ‘they were overtopped’ by the radical Levellers, then, Charles observed, ‘they must apply to the king for their own security’.25

  There had been demands at Putney that Charles be tried as a ‘man of blood’. This was a biblical reference: ‘the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it’.26 Those making the demand wanted Charles convicted in law and then executed. On 9 November Hugh Peter was reported as having assured the Agitators that the king was ‘but as a dead dog’.27

  Yet murder remained the simplest way to dispose of Charles. There was no precedent for placing a King of England on trial. The English judges of Mary, Queen of Scots, had argued that the English crown had long claimed suzerainty over Scotland, making her a subject of Elizabeth, against whom she had committed ‘treason’. Murder, dressed up as accident or misfortune, did not raise any potential legal difficulties and there were plentiful examples of regicide in English history–it was how Henry VI, the last King of England to lose a civil war, had met his end.