The White King

by Leanda de Lisle

  Holland lay flat on the scaffold to position himself on the low block, and shuffled forward and backward on his stomach until he was lying in the exact place the executioner wanted, facing ‘the hall of justice’ where the king had also been convicted. Holland said a prayer and then thrust out his hands as a sign to the axeman. The executioner hesitated. ‘Now! Now!’ Holland cried, and before the final shout was out of his mouth his head fell.14

  The life of Holland’s friend and cousin Lucy Carlisle was, for a time, also at risk. Evidence of her leading involvement in the war of the Engagement had emerged at his trial. Less than a week after Holland’s execution a guard arrived to arrest her at the house of her sister, the Countess of Leicester. She hid in her bedroom, but their commander, the regicide Colonel Thomas Harrison, knew she was in the house and demanded she appear. The arrest warrant was read to her in the hall and she was escorted out. Her sister tried to speak a few words to her but was pushed aside.

  Lucy was taken away for cross-examination on suspicion of treason, and on 21 March taken to the Tower where she was kept ‘close prisoner’. Lucy’s many powerful near relatives eventually achieved her release on licence in the summer of 1651. She immediately continued her Royalist plotting, this time for Charles II, who was about to lead an invasion of England.

  Unburdened by his father’s passionate belief in the episcopal Church of England Charles II had become (in name) a Presbyterian. His reward had been a coronation in Edinburgh and a Scottish army with which to fight for his English throne. It did him little good. Charles II was defeated at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651, and fled back into exile.

  A batch of Lucy’s letters, written to Charles II in 1648 when he was Prince of Wales, was discovered in the royal baggage captured on the battlefield near Worcester. Even more dangerously, a Royalist revealed how Lucy had continued to plot for the Royalist cause. Cromwell, the New Model Army and their allies were busy bringing their opponents to justice, be they conservative Royalists or radical Levellers. But Lucy was seen as yesterday’s rebel. In March 1652 her freedom was confirmed.

  A former courtier once saw Lucy during her enforced retirement sitting by herself at the top of Richmond Hill. She was gazing down at the Thames, and it seemed to him she was enjoying herself more than she had ‘in all her former vanities’.15 It is more likely that she was wistfully recalling these vanities. It was while swimming in the Thames that her friend and occasional rival, Mme de Chevreuse, had drawn crowds in the summer of 1638.16 Now Chevreuse, like Lucy, was growing old and politically irrelevant. In Paris a satirical ‘Geographical Map’ of Louis XIV’s court described her as ‘a large, already rather ancient fortress’, the exterior appearance still ‘imposing but internally in a sad plight’.17

  Meanwhile, Lucy was a mere onlooker in high politics of the English republic. The monarchy had been abolished in 1649 and the ancient coronation regalia–including the crown of Edward the Confessor, that symbol of a people’s love for their king–were destroyed. Nothing would survive save for the small twelfth-century anointing spoon. But war continued. Ireland and Scotland were reduced to provinces of England under the new Commonwealth. The Scots lost their legal system for a time–and their national dignity. The Irish lost very much more: 25 per cent of the population died from famine and disease and many were sent as slaves to the colonies in the Caribbean, or as indentured labour to New England. Thus were the Catholics of Ireland ‘taught liberty’, as Hugh Peter put it.18

  The long-held ambition of the Puritan and aristocratic colonisers to expand England’s empire in the Americas was also not forgotten. Voyages of conquest were launched and England’s Dutch rivals were defeated in the war of 1652–4. Fairfax had resigned in 1650, after refusing to lead the invasion of Scotland, but Cromwell had assumed the office of Lord Protector in 1653, and became a king in all but name. Mrs Cromwell was called ‘Her Highness’ and their daughters were known as ‘princesses’. Warwick bore the sword of state at Cromwell’s virtual coronation, a regal second inauguration as Protector, on 26 June 1657. The families even intermarried. On 14 November 1657 Cromwell’s daughter, the princess Frances, married Warwick’s heir, Robert Rich.

  Warwick died the following spring of 1658. The war against Spain he had always pushed for had, in the end, proved less successful than he had hoped. But his own colonising activities are his legacy. Warwick, Rhode Island, Warwick County and the Warwick river, Virginia, would be just some of the places named after him in what is now the United States. He had been one of the towering figures of the civil war.

  Cromwell died in September 1658. Charles I’s sister, the Winter Queen, rejoiced at the death of a man she had referred to as ‘the beast of Revelation’ and to whom she had long wished ‘the like end and speedily’.19 In France, however, the news brought Charles I’s widow, Henrietta Maria, no happiness. ‘I do not as yet see any great advantage to us,’ she wrote to a friend. The Royalist cause seemed quite defeated, with or without Cromwell. Cromwell’s son Richard succeeded his father in an attempt to mimic the old hereditary system and secure the stability it had offered. Yet if Charles II was incapable of winning back the English crown, the Puritan Commonwealth was nevertheless to fall, leaving behind a lasting distrust in England for political radicalism.

  Taxation had proved more arbitrary during the Commonwealth than it had been under Charles I, liberty was more restricted, and Parliament’s privileges were ignored, while the bullying reformation of manners of Puritan piety continued to be detested. Richard had little of his father’s mettle and stepped down as Protector in May 1559. In due course, a new Parliament backed by General Monck, the commander of the army of occupation in Scotland, recalled Charles II. The restored king entered London on his thirtieth birthday, 19 May 1660, to popular rejoicing.

  In October 1660 ten of those associated with the regicide of Charles I were tried and executed, with another nineteen imprisoned for life. Amongst the victims was Hugh Peter, who had failed to escape back to New England as other pilgrims had done.* In the new year, the corpses of Oliver Cromwell and other long-dead regicides would be dug up, beheaded and dismembered like the corpses of the Ruthven brothers in Scotland on the day that Charles was born. Their shrivelled heads make a grim bookend to the king’s story.

  Meanwhile, on 2 November 1660, Henrietta Maria returned to London, her barge rowed up the Thames surrounded by a welcoming flotilla of boats. It was a low-key affair compared to her first entry in 1625, when the banks had been lined with cheering crowds. The Catholic queen who had fought so hard for her husband remained a controversial figure. She entered the palace without fanfare by the Privy Stairs and was installed in freshly decorated apartments. Her son also had silk taffetas and velvets in Stuart scarlet delivered from the Great Wardrobe to upholster the carriages she would need, and for new fashionable dresses.20

  As the queen dowager prepared to greet old courtiers, Lucy Carlisle was eager to see her former mistress once more. It was to be the first time they had met since 1642, when Henrietta Maria was preparing to flee London with the king and Lucy had failed to persuade them to stay. On 5 November Lucy enjoyed a good dinner at her rented house on the Strand, ordered her sedan chair be brought round to take her to court, and began her toilette. As she was almost ready to leave she took out a new ribbon for her audience with the queen. She never got to wear it. She suffered a massive stroke and died without being able to speak another word.21 She was sixty-one.

  Henrietta Maria made no recorded comment on the death of her former lady-in-waiting. There were other deaths to preoccupy her as she greeted curious courtiers in the palace where her husband had spent his last hours. She had often told her friends that she did not know how she had ‘survived the blow’ of Charles’s beheading.22 Two of their children had died since then–the watchful Elizabeth, at Carisbrooke Castle in September 1650, aged only fourteen, and Henry aged twenty, of smallpox in September 1660. Their daughter Mary–Lucy Carlisle’s god-daughter–would die in Engl
and in December 1660, also of smallpox.

  Henrietta Maria disappointed those who first saw her in London now. The diarist Samuel Pepys described her as ‘a very little plain old woman’. She had once been an innovator in the theatre, an arms buyer, and a warrior with a conquering army, yet she had ‘nothing more in her presence in any respect, nor garb than any ordinary woman’. In time, however, that view would change: the scarlet taffeta was made up into new gowns and Henrietta Maria’s formidable charm would shine again. The court of the queen dowager became the most elegant in England and Henrietta Maria amused and entertained with stories of her rivalry with Buckingham, and of the favourite little dog she had once carried under shell-fire. She even declared to her sister Christine that she was, once more, ‘the most contented person in the world’.23

  New pictures replaced some of Charles’s great art collection, which had been dissipated all over Europe, as well as in Britain. Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of St John had been sold for a mere 140 livres–a little over £11 (only £1 more than Holland had given his executioner in lieu of his bloodied suit).* Cromwell had kept other pictures for himself, and had had a surprising preference for Italian artists, hanging his palaces with some of Charles’s erotic nudes.24 It was not just great men, however, who had acquired Charles’s pictures and other treasures. His ordinary subjects had formed syndicates to invest in his art collection and the Commonwealth had paid debts with art. One syndicate had helped a minor official purchase two paintings by Raphael, while a plumber had ended up with a Titian in part payment of his bill for palace repairs. Indeed, there were small houses across London hanging works painted by Van Dyck, Rubens and Correggio for palaces and princes.25 Some were now returned willingly, some less so: much remains in private collections and museums across the globe.

  In September 1662, Pepys saw Henrietta Maria at court once more, sitting with Charles II and his queen as well as his current mistress, Lady Castlemaine, and his bastard son by Lucy Walter, soon to be made the Duke of Monmouth.26 Henrietta Maria was unfazed by the sexual proclivities of kings. Her younger son, James, was also a notorious lover of women. Charles II admired the fact that James’s pursuit of women surpassed even his own dedication to it. The king was ungenerous, however, to the loyal, flame-haired spy Jane Whorwood. She had returned to her violent husband after Charles I’s execution, and her brutish spouse had injured her several times. Believing her life was at risk, she had left him and they separated officially, but he never paid her the money the courts had ordered him to, and she lived in poverty until her death in 1684 aged seventy-two.

  Henrietta Maria had returned to France for good in the spring of 1665. She wished to be with her youngest child, Henrietta, who had been born while she was on the run during the civil war, and was the only one of her children who had grown up with her. Philip IV of Spain died in September 1665, bequeathing his throne to a son by his second wife and niece, Mariana of Austria. The result of generations of inbreeding, Charles II of Spain was mentally and physically disabled, and incapable of having children. In France, by contrast, Louis XIV was busy creating Europe’s greatest absolute monarchy: France under the Sun King, and not Spain, was to be the great power of the new age.

  Louis XIV’s mother, Anne of Austria, had called Charles I’s death ‘a blow which ought to make all kings tremble’. Louis XIV did not forget it and he treated his aunt with great respect. When Henrietta Maria died on 10 September 1669 he paid for a state funeral. Although her reputation today remains tainted by old prejudices, she had been as remarkable as any of the consorts of Henry VIII, whose reputations have been popularly reassessed. The English ambassador sent a delegation to the Louvre to retrieve the last of her goods. They found, tucked away in a cornelian case, a miniature of Charles I. It was the only portrait of him she had kept. It had been painted in 1623, the year she had first seen him in the Louvre; it was a likeness neither of a martyr nor of a murderer, but of a ‘venturous knight’ who still had his dreams to fufil, and all his great adventures before him.

  * The famous snowstorm described by Thomas Herbert is uncorroborated testimony recalled after the Restoration. Like the image of the smiling corpse, his tale reflects the propaganda of Charles’s last testimony, the Eikon Basilike, that would sustain Royalists in the years ahead: the myth of Charles the martyr.

  * In due course Sir Henry Vane the younger, former governor of Massachusetts, would also go to the block.

  * The late Duke of Buckingham’s white suit that he had worn in Paris in 1625 had, by contrast, been estimated at a value of over £4,000.

  James VI of Scotland and I of England, father of Charles I, in his English coronation robes

  Henry Stuart, Prince of Wales, elder brother of Charles I

  Elizabeth Stuart, Electress Palatine and ‘Winter Queen’ of Bohemia, elder sister of Charles I

  Philip IV of Spain in 1623, the year Charles visited Madrid

  Cardinal Richelieu, Chief Minister of Louis XIII of France

  George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, the man King James called his ‘wife’

  Title page of a plague pamphlet from 1625. On the right is a group of people fleeing from the plague. In response to their words, ‘We fly,’ Death answers, ‘I follow,’ as it did when court and MPs moved to Oxford

  The mother-in-law has landed: Marie de’ Medici, ‘mother of three kings’, and one-time regent of France, as depicted in one of a series of twenty-four paintings by Rubens celebrating her life and achievements

  Charles I, c. 1628

  Charles’s queen, Henrietta Maria, in masque dress

  Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick: privateer, colonialist and rebel

  Henry Rich, Earl of Holland: courtier, knight and turncoat

  Henrietta Maria

  Lucy Hay (née Percy), Countess of Carlisle, descendant of Mary Boleyn, was ‘the most delightful poison ever nature produced’

  John Pym, the Puritan leader later known as ‘King Pym’

  The victorious Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu at La Rochelle

  Anthony Van Dyck’s triple portrait of Charles I was commissioned to enable the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini to create a bust of the king as a papal gift for Henrietta Maria

  Marie de Rohan, Duchesse de Chevreuse, as Diana. The goddess was seen as gender-fluid and used as an icon of women with aspirations to power. The French kings Francois I and Henri II both chose to be depicted as Diana as, at times, would Henrietta Maria

  Charles I and Henrietta Maria dining at court

  The glass sphere in Titian’s Allegory of Marriage, which formed part of Charles’s great art collection, represented the fragility of human happiness

  In 1637 Charles paid Van Dyck £100 for this picture of his five eldest children, Mary, James, Charles, Elizabeth and Anne. In 1625 one of the suits Buckingham wore in Paris was said to be worth ‘fourscore thousand pounds’

  Charles I in armour on the eve of the first ‘Bishops’ War’. In the Van Dyck original, commissioned by the king, Charles’s hand rests on a helmet. In this contemporary copy it rests on a sphere, usually a symbol of power, but here made of glass like that in Titian’s Allegory of Marriage

  The atrocities of the Irish rebellion as reported in England

  Marriage portrait of Mary, the Princess Royal, aged nine, and William of Orange, aged fourteen

  Stands were built for the thousands who witnessed the execution of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford

  The organ case at St Nicholas Church, Stanford on Avon, Leicestershire, is part of an instrument made for Magdalen College Oxford in 1637, and is a rare survivor of the destruction of organs during the civil wars and under the Commonwealth

  A witch mourns the shooting of the poodle, Boy, at Marston Moor

  Boy’s master, Prince Rupert of the Rhine

  The fingernail of Thomas Holland, who was hanged and quartered in 1642 for the capital crime of being a Catholic priest in England. His body parts were displayed on London’s gates

 
Charles’s saddle from the Battle of Naseby

  The battlefield at Naseby

  The captive royal children, Elizabeth, James and Henry

  Anne of Austria, queen consort of France, with her son, the future Louis XIV

  Charles’s daughter Mary, Princess of Orange

  Oliver Cromwell

  ‘Black’ Tom Fairfax