However, the tailor went ahead and produced a mix of light and dark mohair, with a crimson underskirt. The scarlet skirt was a kind of in-joke, a royal robe reused.
Meanwhile, James had intelligently arranged a routine of playing hide-and-seek with his brother and sister, Prince Henry and Princess Elizabeth, after supper, ‘and sometimes he would hide himself so well that in half an hour’s time they could not find him. His Highness had so used them to this that when he went really away they thought he was but at the usual sport.’ James had also persuaded one of the still-loyal gardeners to lend him the key to the gate which led out into St James’s Park. Both Charles’s elder sons were much better at getting around useful people than their father, as one of Henrietta Maria’s French ladies noticed: ‘having observed often the great defects of the late king’s breeding and the stiff roughness that was in him, by which he disobliged very many and did often prejudice his affairs very much’, Henrietta had insisted that her sons ‘should be bred to a wonderful civility’. James’s childhood uncannily paralleled his father’s; like his father, he was always the second son, the less important one, beached, bereft. And like Charles I himself, James was lumbered with a handsome, clever, older, taller brother with whom half the world was in love. He grew up quarrelsome, requiring proofs of love. And like his father, it was to doom him.
But he was intelligent. Immediately after supper, under cover of the hide-and-seek game, he slipped down the privy stairs to where Bampfield waited at the garden gate. He clapped a periwig on James’s head, swathed him in a cloak, and they set off.
Anne was waiting for them in a house Bampfield had rented, on the river by London Bridge. Bampfield told her not to wait after ten o’clock; if they had not arrived by then, it would mean they had been discovered, and she must fly.
Ten o’clock struck, and Anne was still alone. Bampfield’s servant began to urge flight, but Anne refused to leave. ‘I had come with a resolution to serve His Highness and I was fully determined not to leave that place till I was out of hopes of doing what I came there for.’
Then she heard ‘a great noise of many as I thought coming upstairs, which I expected to be soldiers come to take me’. But it was James; he burst in, shouting eagerly, ‘Quickly, quickly, dress me.’ Anne did so, and admired his prettiness. Her warm and motherly heart had a snack ready for him, and a Woodstreet cake, which she knew he loved, to take on his journey. Then there was no more time, and Bampfield led the strange young gentlewoman in his awkward skirts to the barge which was to take them to Gravesend, and then to Holland.
As soon as they had gone, Anne and her faithful maid Miriam had to face the long walk back through the dark streets to Anne’s brother’s house. But the streets seemed deserted; they could detect no sign of hue and cry, and they reached home in safety.
The next day, the escape was discovered, and Parliament moved to close the Cinque Ports, and to search every ship, but before the orders had even reached the wardens, James was safely at sea. Bampfield delivered James to his sister Mary at The Hague, and then returned to England to lie low. As soon as he arrived, he made contact with Anne, who continued to work for him and for the king, which necessitated frequent visits to his rooms. She knew the risk she was running; she knew that she could be exposed as his mistress, but she herself said that everything she did was justified by her wish to serve the king.
But one day Anne found Bampfield lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling. She asked him what was wrong. He told her his wife was dead. He had heard this from a faithful servant – but they must keep it a secret, he warned, or her estates might be sequestered by Parliament. After carefully working out their joint income, he invited Anne to marry him, and after some hesitation she accepted, agreeing to postpone the wedding until they knew whether the king’s affairs would prosper.
Was Anne his mistress? Some of her family probably thought so, and there is a leaf missing from her memoirs, which were themselves written fifteen years after the fact by a lady now both widowed and pious. She was later anxious about marrying someone else; there may have been some kind of secret ceremony, one that permitted intimacy. For Anne, the Civil War did not break down the family structure, but it dissolved enough of Bampfield’s social identity to allow him to reinvent himself in her eyes. But like many an adventurer, Bampfield had been economical with the truth. Anne heard he was in prison, and the same day, she also heard that his wife was still alive, that he had ‘abused’ her. Anne immediately fell very sick. Bampfield had other things on his mind.
He wrote to the king, suggesting that a rescue operation might be launched. The Prince of Wales, he thought, might lead a force which could storm Carisbrooke and carry the king away. The Prince of Wales had other, saner ideas, but Bampfield’s plan made him feel guilty. Seeing the mad but stalwart colonel became unwelcome; it is hard to act as a Royalist when the leading royal doesn’t relish your company.
What could Bampfield do? Turncoat that he was, the best option seemed to be working for his former enemies, and he acted as a spy for the Protectorate, fleeing England at the Restoration. In his new home, the Dutch republic, he was again active in public service, but retired to a small town in the far north, a place he later described as ‘this Egyptian darkness’, ‘this dead calm’; his metaphors illustrate the eloquence which made him so attractive to witty, clever Anne. There he wrote his memoirs, eager to defend himself. This was necessary because tensions generated by the Rye House plot of 1683 against Charles II, and specifically James’s conversion to Catholicism, threatened to spiral out and involve him.
Like many another broken-hearted woman, Anne found some solace in nursing soldiers. She went to Scotland to tend the sick and wounded of the wars: ‘She became very famous and helpful to many,’ wrote her biographer, ‘both poor and rich, though it was mainly with respect to the poor that she undertook that practice.’ She had her own special home-made medicines, balms and plasters. ‘In the summer season she vied with the bee or ant in gathering herbs, flowers, worms, snails etc.’ and she treated sixty men in one day, many riddled with rot, stinking, dying. She saw a man whose brain was exposed and bubbling with what she called water, and a boy of sixteen who had been run through with a tuck, and was swarming with ‘creatures’, maggots. She noted that very few of the soldiers had their wounds dressed on the field, so that ‘it may be imagined that they were very noisome, but one particularly was in that degree who was shot through the arm that none was able to stay in the room, but all left me. Accidentally a gentleman came in, who seeing me (not without reluctancy) cutting off the man’s sleeve of his doublet, which was hardly fit to be touched, he was so charitable as to take a knife and cut it off and fling it into the fire.’
Later, Anne married her employer while working as his governess. Before they were united, however, Colonel Bampfield made a final appearance. Seductive as ever, he tried to persuade Anne that he was honest. Anne told him that she was already married to Sir James Halkett. He asked her if she was wedded. ‘I am’, she said boldly. She breathed the word ‘not’ under her breath so she would not be forsworn. At least she had the satisfaction of lying to a liar.
Later, Anne met the future Charles II in Dunfermline. He congratulated her and gave her a purse of gold. Not for rescuing his brother, but for her work among the wounded. Later still, James II gave her a pension himself, though by now his religious beliefs had made him an embarrassment to devoutly Protestant Anne, who wrote of her ‘greatest abhorrence to the mischevious designs of the Roman Church, whose pernicious counsels and violent methods had threatened the total subversion of religion and Liberties, and had actually sacrificed the King and Three Kingdoms, to promote their interests’. There was an irony in the fact that the prince who brought the three kingdoms closest to Rome had been helped to escape by a devoutly Protestant woman. She had played a crucial part in a cunning, dramatic rescue, one that was a foreshadowing of the escapes of later, lonelier Stuart princes.
XXVII Nor Iron Bars a Ca
ge: The Capture of Charles I
On 27 April 1646, just before dawn, King Charles I left Oxford. He rode over Magdalen Bridge and up Headington Hill, following the road to the south. He had no clear idea of where he was going or what he would do. The little party headed for Henley. Then they went on to Hillingdon and stopped for a meal. Then they waited for three or four hours.
No one knew what Charles was waiting for. Some thought he was hoping to slip somehow into the backstreets of London, to lead a revolt of loyal citizens. His advisers urged him to abandon any such idea. The little party set out again, for St Albans. And there they were accosted by an old man with a halberd, who asked them who they were. ‘From Parliament’, they said, but a horseman galloped up out of the gathering darkness; the king’s party nearly jumped out of their skins with fright. But it was only a drunk, a bore, whose company they had to bear as far as Wheathampstead. They decided to cut their hair, but as they only had knives, the result was untidy.
They travelled on, through the outskirts of the Fens, to Downham Market. By now word had travelled fast and far that the king had escaped. Charles attracted suspicion by burning papers in his room at the inn. The town barber, too, could not help but suspect when invited to trim the royal party’s frayed locks. Charles waited for word from the Scots, and it came; they would not compel him to anything against his conscience. He had to be satisfied with that. He rode on, but by a leisurely route, through Huntingdon, past places where he had hunted in happier days, to sleep on the floor of an alehouse at Coppingford, with the alehouse keeper and his family snoring beside him. The Scots accepted his surrender at once, as soon as he reached Newark. They could hardly believe their luck. With Charles in their custody, they felt sure they could make peace for all the kingdoms; they felt confident that Charles would accept their proposals in religion.
But it took only days for these hopes to sour. Charles entered Newcastle, and found that his entry lacked the ceremonial due a monarch. He was lodged in the mayor’s house, guarded by musketeers. His long imprisonment had begun, and he knew it. He urged his followers to flee before the Scots could hand them over to Parliament. Now began his religious instruction, but Charles steadfastly stood by his Anglican faith. He knew, he said, that the Church needed bishops, because he had been instructed to believe it by his royal father James VI – of Scotland.
But, said his Presbyterian opponents, kings had to break with the past to bring about the Reformation in the first place. If Henry VIII had believed what his father taught him, there could be no reform. And anyway, James would have welcomed the sweeping away of bishops. Charles was icy. It touched a raw nerve, this assumption of knowledge about his father. He claimed identity with his father: ‘I had the happiness to know him much better than you.’ The little boy once bullied and neglected by his father was now his defender. Even when rows of Covenanters begged him to convert on their bended knees, he refused. Their bullying induced an aching melancholy: ‘I never knew what it was to be barbarously baited before,’ he wrote to Henrietta Maria, ‘there was never man so alone as I … no living soul to help me … all the comfort I have is thy love and a clear conscience.’ Mazarin’s envoy Jean de Montreuil was impressed with his dignity, and his ‘kindly demeanour’ to those who ‘treat him with very little civility’.
Charles had rational reasons for opposing Presbyterians and their Covenant, too, but for him rationality was always mixed with passionate feeling. The Church, he thought, could never flourish without the protection of the Crown, and therefore the Church’s dependence on the Crown was ‘the chiefest support of regal authority’. Presbyterianism, he felt, could only ‘bring anarchy into any country’.
But for the Scots who had signed the Covenant, Presbyterianism had become a matter of national identity. The Covenanters were not sourbellies who wanted to spoil everyone’s fun, but men and women who believed that they, low-born, and ordinary, could bring Scotland closer to God. They didn’t have to wait for bishops to say they could do it. They could do it themselves. Covenanting gave them what social theorists now call ‘agency’, the sense that they were shaping great events. They remembered the passionate and apocalyptic fervour of the prayer book riots. They knew that was what power felt like. They were not going to give in.
At an individual level, the Covenanters and Charles shared a close, passionate and personal relationship with God. God was important in a way we in the twenty-first century can hardly begin to grasp. He was endowed with a mixture of the qualities of a beloved but powerful boss, a father, and a best friend, and he could fulfil all of those roles in turn. His worshippers did not only kneel to him out of fear of hellfire; they spent hours every day trying to put themselves in his presence. Everything that Covenanters did was filtered through the frighteningly tight-meshed sieve of Calvinism, which required that the believer constantly ask himself if he were saved. This was not unlike very strict dieting – rules were made, and then appetites revived and they were broken, and then self-loathing set in, leading to more and harsher rules. Those who are thus strict with themselves can hardly be lenient with others.
The king worried about his crown, his children and his own safety. And he worried most of all about religion. In a letter, he pointed out that ‘this is a right way to make me a Papist, for if I follow your present advices concerning religion, I foresee such a necessity for it, that the time will come you will persuade me with more earnestness to submit to the Pope, than now you do for my concession to Presbyterian government; for, questionless, it is less ill, in many respects, to submit to one than many Popes’. He worried desperately about preserving the rights of his son. T have already cast up what I am like to suffer, which I shall meet (by the grace of God) with that constancy that befits me. Only I desire that consolation, that assurance from you, as I may justly hope my cause shall not end with my misfortunes, by assuring me that misplaced pity to me do not prejudice my son’s right.’
It is as if Charles was foreseeing his execution; certainly he wanted to get away. But Henrietta Maria was against it. She told him that all his friends abroad disliked the idea. ‘I conjure you, that till the Scots shall declare that they will not protect you, you do not think of making any escape from England … You would destroy all our hopes, besides the danger of the attempt’, she wrote.
Contemporaries said she took this view because she was having an affair with her courtier and confidant Henry Jermyn. It wasn’t true, but the rumour might have increased her husband’s melancholy. Charles wrote to her abjectly, pleadingly, as once he’d written to his brother: ‘I assure thee, both I and my children are ruined, if thou shouldst retire from my business: for God’s sake leave off threatening me with the desire to meddle no more with business … As thou lovest me give me so much comfort (and God knows I have but little, and that little must come from thee) as to assure me that thou wilt think no more of any such thing.’ He still hated to feel himself alone.
The Scots handed Charles over to Parliament in January 1647. After living with him for a while, they had despaired of a quick peace. They were going home with 100,000 pounds. Among the commissioners sent by Parliament were Pembroke and Denbigh, old friends of the king’s. They agreed to Charles’s suggestion of moving to Holdenby House in Northamptonshire, the largest private house in England, built by Queen Elizabeth I’s favourite Christopher Hatton. For the men of Parliament, Holdenby had the advantage of being firmly in godly territory, in the east.
The journey south was a progress in all but name. In Durham, in Leeds, in Nottingham and Leicester, people flocked to see him, pressed him to touch them for the king’s evil, prayed for him, cheered him. As Sir Thomas Herbert dryly noted, some were there out of curiosity, but others out of love. At Holdenby itself, he found his chaplains, and more crowds hoping for the royal touch. He did have to accept Parliament’s appointees as personal servants (and hence spies); the gentle and civil Thomas Herbert as Groom of the Bedchamber alongside the stalwart Harrington. Otherwise, it was almost like ol
d times. Charles spent a few hours reading every day, enjoyed walking, games of chess, the occasional game of bowls in Althorp. Not the life of a king, perhaps, but the life of a civil and sober gentleman. And Charles’s pious love of the Church of England was unquenched; he resumed his pre-war Sunday acts of devotion. On Sundays he sequestered himself.
And he managed to get news, too; one day when he was out riding a supporter named Boswell, a Royalist spy, dressed as a labourer, thrust a parcel of letters from the queen into his hands. Charles hastily told the commissioners that the man had a personal suit for preferment. Another time, one of his visitors was seized and searched. This was Lady Jane Whorwood, who later tried to help Charles escape. She was the daughter of a man who had surveyed James I’s stables; the king’s most loyal supporters often came from such families, loyal tradesmen or professionals whose lives had been bound up with the court. Jane married at nineteen, and her husband, Brome Whorwood, came of a minor gentry family from Holton. Like Mary Milton, Jane’s political sympathies remained with her birth family, and the marriage collapsed. Again like Mary, Jane was attractive, and at twenty-seven she had a magnificent head of fire-red hair, though an ungallant Parliamentarian also noted that she had ‘pock-holes in her face’. Anthony à Wood said that she was ‘the most loyal person to King Charles I in his miseries, as any woman in England’.
Charles wrote to her in the romantic terms of the court of love which he and Henrietta had created before the war, calling her ‘sweet Jane Whorwood’, and signing himself ‘your most loving Charles’ and ‘your best Platonick lover and servant’. She adopted the nom de plume Helen: Helen of Troy, who deserted her husband for her true love, Paris, for whose beauty a war was fought. Separated from Henrietta, and also badgered and nagged by her, perhaps doubtful of her fidelity, Charles enjoyed Lady Jane’s devotion. He never once mentioned her to the queen.
The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only) Page 54