Hopes of a quick settlement along Presbyterian lines were also dealt a blow by the capture of the King’s personal correspondence. A remarkable feature of the battle had been the discipline of the parliamentarian troops once the royalists had broken ranks and begun to flee. As the horse followed in ruthless pursuit, forbidden on pain of death to dismount for plunder, the rich pickings of the field were left to the foot. Among the prizes were arms, ammunition and more or less the entire baggage train, including the King’s own coach, which contained his correspondence. It revealed in detail the wide gap between many of his public statements and his private convictions: for parliamentarians, in other words, the depth of his untrustworthiness. The letters were read to the two Houses and then at a Common Hall in the City. Selections were published as The Kings Cabinet opened, and those anxious to verify their accuracy and genuineness were invited to examine the originals.27 Publication was justified as religious duty: ‘It were a great sin against the mercies of God, to conceal these evidences of truth, which he so graciously (and almost miraculously) by surprisal of these papers, hath put into our hands’. But it was also a means to enlighten ‘our seduced brethren… that they may see their errors, and return into the right way’. Others, of course, were wilful and beyond reason. Rather than revile them, and following the example of the Apostle St Jude, the editors merely confronted them with the truth: ‘They may see here in his private letters what affection the King bears to his people, what language and titles he bestows upon his Great Council; which we return not again, but consider with sorrow, that it comes from a Prince seduced out of his proper sphere’.28
Here, from the hand of God, was proof positive of the justice of the parliamentarian cause. Anyone ‘well affected to that cause of liberty and religion’ maintained by the English and Scottish parliaments ‘against a combination of all the Papists in Europe almost, especially the bloody tigers of Ireland, and some of the prelatical and court faction in England’ will be ‘abundantly satisfied… how the court has been Cajoled… by the Papists, and we the more believing sort of Protestants, by the Court’. ‘Cajole’ (‘To prevail upon or get one’s way with (a person) by delusive flattery, specious promises, or any false means of persuasion’) was another new word thrown up by conditions of civil war. Apparently imported from the French, it was ‘the new authentic word now amongst our Cabalistic adversaries’.29 Again it bears testimony, both in its meaning and the context of its appearance in the language, to the increasing difficulty of arriving at the truth of matters, despite the massive increase in the flow of printed information. In private spaces – the cabinet and the closet – truth resided, and could be revealed: ‘[the closet is] the most secret place in the house appropriate unto our own private studies, and wherein we repose and deliberate by deep consideration of all our weightiest affairs’. It was ‘a place where our readings of importance are shut up, a room proper and peculiar to ourselves’.30 The revelation of private letters, the breaching of closets and the opening of cabinets, was a common literary form; revelation of these private statements gave the lie to a dissembling or dextrous public front.31
The main body of the pamphlet consists of transcripts of thirty-nine letters and papers, almost all of them individually witnessed as accurate by Zouch Tate, Miles Corbett or Edmund Prideaux and one by P.W. The cumulative effect is damning, including for example a letter written to Ormond during the Uxbridge negotiations telling him to secure peace or at least a cessation in Ireland, and to offer military support against the Scottish forces and even, if necessary, the Earl of Inchiquin, a prominent and vigorous defender of the Protestant interest.32 The letters reveal a manifestly half-hearted commitment to the Uxbridge negotiations, and a complete unwillingness to give ground on episcopacy and the militia (two issues identified in the preface as core parts of the parliamentary cause from the Nineteen Propositions onwards). Many other letters demonstrate how willing he was to pursue alternative and incompatible policies at the same time as negotiating for peace. Here was vindication for those who had been reluctant to see the Uxbridge treaty go forward. As the City Alarum put it: ‘it hath unlocked the mystery of former treaties, so I hope it will lock up our minds from thoughts of future’.33
Following the transcripts were four pages of annotations which made great play of the influence of Henrietta Maria: ‘the Kings Counsels are wholly managed by the Queen, though she be of the weaker sex, born an alien, bred up in a contrary religion’; her advice had the effect of commands, and the ‘King professes to prefer her health before the exigence and importance of his own public affairs’; and she was ‘as harsh, and imperious towards the King… as she is implacable to our religion, nation, and government’.34 Examples of counsel hostile to English interest illustrated this latter point, such as suggestions for a trade embargo and the dissolution of Parliament. Fears that, like Laud and Strafford, her head might well be on the block were clearly well-founded.
But the King too was guilty, and not just of being under the thumb: ‘in many things’, in fact, he exceeded ‘the Queen for acts of hostility and covering them over with deeper and darker secrecy’.35 There followed a devastating catalogue of his ‘dextrous’ dealings against national interests, the international Protestant cause, English parliaments and religion. ‘The King will declare nothing in favour of his parliament, so long as he can find a party to maintain him in this opposition; nor perform any thing which he hath declared so long as he can find a sufficient party to excuse him from it’.36 This was a longstanding weakness, as a brief history of his reign made clear. Finally the pamphlet compared six important public statements with his private views as revealed by the correspondence. All six were juxtaposed with ‘distinctions’ that might make apparently contradictory statements reconcilable. The presentation of these letters has had a devastating effect on subsequent views of Charles.
Despite the political damage, however, and the ruthlessly effective exploitation of this windfall, there were those who felt that these letters should not have been published. The Kings Cabinet had tried to forestall objections. Enemies to ‘parliaments and reformation… made wilful in their enmity’ could be expected to ‘deny these papers to have been written by the King’s own hand, or else that we make just constructions and inferences out of them’. Or deny that, although accurately recorded and interpreted, ‘they are blameable, or unjustifiable against such rebels as we are’. In fact the replies did not contest the authenticity, but rather the construction placed on them or how reprehensible the King had been. ‘The letters are not unworthy [of] a Prince Defender of the Faith, against whom so dangerous and causeless a Rebellion was then in its height, threatening both to his government, and to the Protestant profession of the Christian religion in this Kingdom, an utter ruin’, went one response.37 Another complained that ‘They will not let him loath a rebel, nay, they will not let him love a wife; they will not let him use his sword, nay, they will not let him use his pen, but they will expose him for it’.38 A plausible line of defence was that in order to make peace in such a complex situation, Charles needed to keep his own counsels, and that concessions for that purpose were not only carefully considered, but noble. Suspending punishment of Catholics might be a good deal in order to secure the established church, for example. And why shouldn’t he bring in foreign forces, if his own subjects had deserted him?
This was a hard battle to win, not least because it required such close attention from readers. The author of A Key To the Kings cabinet, for example, did a clever job of reconciling a secret promise to abrogate the laws against popery with a public declaration to put them into execution: a promise to execute them is not a promise not to repeal them; a promise to abrogate the statutes clearly implies that he will do it with parliamentary consent.39 But really this was in many places very unpromising material for Charles’s defenders.
Others concentrated on the issue of seemliness, however: something at the heart of controversies over publication during the 1640s. As one pamph
let’s response to the speeches at Common Hall put it: ‘Men indeed, whose religion will allow them to ransack God’s cabinet, no marvel, if they quickly find reason not to spare the King’s’.40 Here was the obverse of the revelation of private truths for public purposes – a kind of violation. Bruno Ryves, in his accounts of the spoliation of parliamentary troops, made much mention of the invasion of private spaces, especially ladies” closets.41 The publication of the letters robbed the King of his dignity, something essential to the negotiation of a peace, and in revealing the depth of his dependence on Henrietta Maria they had violated his privacy.42
Reading these responses it is easy to see Charles’s point of view: he was being asked to agree to things that were, in his view, absolutely wrong; and that was a much more serious thing for a king than for one of his subjects. Moreover, he was being pushed into them by armed subjects, unable to recognize their duties to him as the anointed monarch, and to justify himself to all his subjects in a world of printed propaganda. Since these things were unacceptable, and since the war was not going his way, what option did he have but to play for time and seek other sources of support? And, in any case, Parliament routinely prepared for war while negotiating for peace – this was in the nature of the crisis since 1642. Nonetheless, after the revelation of these letters no-one who did a deal with him could be comfortable that it would stick. Their revelation did no favours to the moderates at Westminster, and they immediately scuppered proposals for a peace treaty floated in the Lords, with the support of the Covenanters, in the week after Naseby.43
By any normal standards Naseby was terrible enough: one eyewitness reported that ‘I saw the field so bestrewed with carcasses of horses and men, the bodies lay slain about four miles in length but most thick on the hill where the king stood’.44 It was politically very significant, but not immediately seen as strategically so. Most of the King’s cavalry got away and Goring’s army, by virtue of its absence, was still intact. Two further developments served to turn Naseby into the decisive battle of the war – the triumphant march of the New Model through the West Country and the defeat of Montrose.
Following Naseby, Charles headed for the Welsh hills, arriving at Hereford on 19 June. On the previous day he had renewed his appeal to Ormond for Irish troops and such were his hopes of success that Langdale was made governor of north Wales in preparation for their arrival. On 27 June preparations were made to receive them in Cornwall too. Fairfax followed up the victory at Naseby first by laying siege to Leicester, which surrendered on 18 June. Further moves were made cautiously, given the presence of Goring’s force in the west, and the mustering of the King’s forces in the Marches. But from late June the New Model fought an apparently irresistible campaign in Dorset and Somerset. The siege of Taunton had been lifted on 29 June, probably in fear of Fairfax’s approach.45 But the march to relieve the siege was hampered by a ‘third force’: armed bodies of local people referred to as ‘clubmen’. It was the second significant occasion when the field armies had been confronted in this way: a similar force had severely hampered royalist operations at Hereford earlier in the spring.46
Goring’s orders were to fall back towards the Bristol Channel to await the arrival of regiments from Wales, but Fairfax managed to meet up with Goring’s forces near Crewkerne and outmanoeuvred him, bringing them to battle at Langport on 10 July. Goring had sent his baggage train on ahead to Bridgewater and was intending to manage a retreat there. At Langport, outnumbered, he took up position on a hill overlooking a stream swollen with recent rain, and posted musketeers among the hedges that lined the fields and lanes from the ford up to his position. From this position Goring apparently thought he would not be attacked. But an artillery bombardment from the parliamentarians forced Goring’s cavalry off the hillside, leaving the musketeers without support. Fairfax then sent 1,500 musketeers across the stream, under Colonel Rainborough, who advanced with considerable courage against entrenched opponents. When the moment seemed right 200 cavalrymen charged up a lane defended by Major Christopher Bethell, a charge which again required considerable courage. When they reached the top of the hill they were outnumbered perhaps six or eight to one, and there was close battle at sword point. But parliamentary support began to arrive and the royalist forces began to scatter. In the aftermath of the battle, as the royalists made for Bridgewater, Fairfax captured 1,400 prisoners, 2,000 horses, 4,000 arms, two cannon and three wagonloads of ammunition.47 The last royalist field army in England had been routed.
Siege was laid to Bridgewater on 16 July and it fell on 23 July, completing a chain of parliamentary strongpoints which cut off the west – from Lyme through Langport and Bridgewater with Taunton an advanced point.48 Rather than march into Cornwall like Essex had the previous year, Fairfax chose to operate elsewhere, knowing that royalist forces were bottled up in the peninsula. Goring’s retreat into Devon was marked by assaults by clubmen, and royalists fleeing from Langport were also hunted.49
With Goring’s army broken, the remaining objectives in the west were the main royalist garrisons, particularly at Bristol and Exeter. Fairfax’s advance on Bristol was hampered by his own difficulties with armed locals, the clubmen. Fairfax negotiated with them on 3 July, having executed a soldier for plundering. His attitude hardened, however, and he arrested their leaders at Shaftesbury on 2 August and two days later Cromwell dispersed a large assembly at Hambledon Hill in a brief and largely bloodless rout. Fairfax had continued to enjoy the advantage through July, taking the surrender of Bath on 29 July (with the support of Somerset clubmen), and laying siege to Sherborne Castle on 2 August. On 11 August the siege train arrived at Sherborne and the castle fell four days later. Bristol now became the priority and siege was laid there in late August.50
As his fortunes waned in the west, England was largely lost to Charles (see Map 4). Naseby had been decisive for the Midlands and, therefore, the north. Royalist hopes flickered briefly in Wales, where Charles Gerrard fought a successful campaign against the parliamentary commander, Rowland Laugharne. In early July, Charles was in south Wales trying to raise troops to compensate for his losses in England, but there and in Hereford he was finding it difficult to press men. These hopes were extinguished by a parliamentary victory at Colby Moor (1 August), where successful co-ordination of operations on sea and land enabled Major-General Laugharne to rout the royalists under Sir Edward Stradling. It seemed that here too the royalist cause was crumbling, and Haverfordwest Castle fell on 5 August.51
The King’s own army was now faced by both Fairfax and Leven, who had moved south during June, reassured that the King was not intending an invasion of Scotland. A week after Naseby he was at Mansfield and he was soon to lay siege to Hereford. Charles was finding it hard to get men, but he drew strength from news of Montrose’s continued successes. In May, Montrose had headed north from Blair Athol, away from the numerically superior Covenanting forces. In June fresh levies were made in the Highlands and by the end of the month he was sufficiently confident to offer battle to Baillie at Keith. This was declined but on 1 July battle was joined at Alford, where Montrose won another great, and bloody, victory. Charles now set his hopes on getting to Yorkshire, raising men there and, on the basis of garrisons at Pontefract and Scarborough, making some connection with Montrose. To join Montrose from the crumbling position in Wales was a tall order, however. Charles set off on a meandering and ultimately unsuccessful march, leaving Hereford only to return, via Doncaster, Huntingdon and Oxford, a month later. It was in Huntingdon that Charles heard of Montrose’s crushing victory over the Covenanters at Kilsyth. The most that could be said for his own march, however, was that Charles had avoided Leven’s army. The King entered Hereford on 4 September, having seen Leven’s siege of the city lifted, and spirits were a little higher.52
Once in Hereford, however, Charles received flurries of bad news. Fairfax summoned Bristol to surrender on 4 September. Whereas the King had not been able to recruit in south Wales again in early September, Fairf
ax’s army was reinforced by 5,000 local people. Rupert recognized the desperate straits he was in and on 5 September asked for permission to communicate with the King. This was refused and he then spun out negotiations. On 10 September Fairfax lost patience and Bristol was stormed. Rupert surrendered and on the following day Bristol was evacuated. Charles blamed Rupert and, effectively, banished him.53
Only Montrose’s campaign in Scotland offered the royalists any immediate comfort and, with his position in England deteriorating still further, Charles sought once again to join him. Marching from Hereford via Chirk he entered Chester with the intention of raising the siege. Langdale arrived to attack the besieging army from the rear, but was badly defeated at Rowton Heath. The parliamentary victory threatened the future of Chester, the only remaining port of importance for Ireland, and cut off the hope of a march northwards to Scotland through Lancashire. The final blow for this particular strategy was the catastrophic defeat of Montrose at Philiphaugh on 13 September (see Map 5). On 6 September, Leslie returned to Scotland with troops and three days later prominent supporters of Montrose among the Lowland aristocracy were imprisoned. Met in battle on 13 September, Montrose’s scanty cavalry were quickly disposed of and the foot destroyed. Two hundred and fifty Irish troops were killed and fifty or more surrendered on the promise of quarter. Most of them were subsequently shot on the pretence that the offer of quarter had applied only to officers, and a notorious massacre of Irish women and other camp followers then took place, which Leslie failed to stop. Charles had retreated to Denbigh, where, on 27 September, he heard the news from Philiphaugh and that Chester could not last much longer.54
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