They joined up with Marmaduke Langdale at Carlisle, and set off after Lambert, now outnumbering him. After a failure to engage early in the summer, Hamilton, with characteristic indecisiveness, decided to wait for the rest of his forces, which dribbled in, including the few Ulstermen who had managed the journey. The delay was fatal, as help was on its way for Lambert, who was just over the Pennines. His men were subsisting on bean bread, eaten only by the poorest. But Cromwell, after taking Pembroke Castle, was moving north, having paused only for a thanksgiving service in a Pembroke church. He sent his cavalry in advance, with typical boldness. His infantry were almost barefoot in the thick mud, so he had to divert to Leicester to pick up new shoes for them, but this also enabled him to collect fresh troops in the Midlands. He was anxious to join forces with Lambert before either of them met the Scots, and he did so successfully on 12 August 1648.
Still Hamilton did not move, except against the local inhabitants; his army spent its time plundering the countryside. At last he managed to collect his troops and to advance, along the Lancashire borders, hoping to join up with men from Wales. His disorganized forces marched towards Preston, strung out and blind to Cromwell, who had already reached Skipton, and who knew perfectly where Hamilton’s army was. Cromwell decided to attack and the battle that followed, usually called Preston, was arguably Cromwell’s masterpiece. Outnumbered, almost swamped, he managed to destroy Hamilton’s much larger forces in an engagement that was less a single set-piece than a series of piecemeal fights in which the Scots and their Royalist allies were picked off at Cromwell’s leisure.
First, he surprised a substantial body of straggling Royalists; they fought all day up a long, deep, muddy lane which was soon full of trampled dead. The Royalists had forgotten to secure their retreat, too, and when they tried to cross the Ribble, were trapped by Cromwell’s troops.
At the end of that first day, Hamilton still had more men than Cromwell, but the Royalists were so tired that they lay down in the mud, exhausted. The next day, the Scots managed to get away, pursued by Cromwell. The Royalists had little powder left, and what they had was wet. They spent the night in Wigan. Cromwell’s men spent the night in a field, ‘very dirty and weary’, he recalled. Next day the pursuit continued. The Royalists decided on a last stand; they made themselves a stronghold, a bank, where they managed to force Cromwell’s vanguard back. But some local men – who had probably been plundered by the Scots – showed Cromwell a way around the flank, and from then on it was a slaughter, with Cromwell estimating a thousand dead and two thousand prisoners. The Royalist remnants surrendered next day, soaked in mud, sleepless, starving. Some of the leaders fled, but eventually even Marmaduke Langdale was unearthed in a Nottingham alehouse, and Hamilton in Stafford on 23 August. In Scotland, Argyll had the Engagement declared a sin, and anti-Engagement Covenanters began throwing out the remaining cavalry troops, and then triumphantly marched on Edinburgh. They were poor, and they were poorly armed, but they were supported by Cromwell, who brought his victorious troops to the border, and demanded the surrender of the remaining garrisons in Carlisle and Berwick. Over dinner in Edinburgh, Argyll and Cromwell struck a deal which shut the Engagers and Montrose’s followers out of public office.
Lancashire was a ruin, with hardly a horse or a cow left. Penzance was so ‘exquisitely plundered’ food prices rose 50%, and the price of wheat doubled.
Cromwell reported to Parliament: ‘Surely this is nothing but the hand of God, and wherever anything in the world is exalted, or exalts itself, God will pull it down, for this is the day wherein he alone will be exalted. It is not fit for me to give advice, nor to say a word what use should be made of this, more than to pray you, and all that acknowledge God, that they would exalt him, and not hate his people, who are the apple of his eye, and for whom even kings shall be reproved.’ This was disingenuous. Cromwell was actually giving plenty of advice. But despite the Army’s views, Parliament went on trying to treat with Charles.
Now only Colchester was left in Royalist hands. Conditions in the town were desperate, but the commander, Lucas, had no intention of surrender. The Parliamentarians decided to call upon a siege expert, the Leveller Thomas Rainborough, who was to be another victim of the Second Civil War, though indirectly. He had faced a naval mutiny which coincided with the Royalist uprisings, but had managed to get ashore because his own men liked and trusted him. It was unwise; out of the navy, he re-enlisted in the army and ended up facing the Royalists across the walls of Colchester; Rainborough the siege expert was vital, and Colchester duly fell.
After months of bitter siege, the starving town wanted to surrender. Lucas and Norwich refused, but the desperate townspeople eventually forced them to give in, and the town was in Fairfax’s hands once more by 28 August 1648.
The stubbornness of the Royalist commanders made Fairfax more determined to punish them, and when negotiations began, his steely attitude was only too evident. Both the commanders Lucas and Lisle had promised never to take up arms against Parliament when captured before, at Stow and Faringdon. Moreover, Lucas had killed two men himself when the garrison at Stinchcombe in Gloucestershire surrendered. But what really motivated the Army was the besieged troops’ use of poisoned bullets. Fairfax sent Norwich and Capel to London, but immediately sentenced Lucas, Lisle and the third leader, Gascoigne, to death, that same night in the castle yard. As Lucas was led forward, he asked Ireton on what grounds he was being killed, in a manner eerily proleptic of what Charles himself would say later at his trial. Ireton, cold as ever, replied tersely that he was a rebel who had committed high treason. Lucas went on defending himself; he was only fighting for his king, he said. As a soldier, how could that be treason?
He was silenced by a bullet. Lisle was next, and he asked the firing squad to move closer for a cleaner kill. They said, grumpily, that they would not miss, and Lisle, with a ghostly grin, suggested they had missed him at closer range before. Finally, they moved in, and it was a clean kill. Then Gascoigne was suddenly reprieved – he was actually a Tuscan mercenary, Bernardo Guasconi, fighting under an English name. Later, Capel too was to be executed.
Rainborough himself was killed in the same year at Pontefract. He was murdered by two Royalists who found him unarmed in his room. His funeral, at the Independent chapel in Wapping, was a last rallying point for the Levellers. ‘Rainborough, the just, the valiant and the true’, said his epitaph.
And the garrisons who had fought against Parliament, at Colchester and in the north? Sent to Bristol, sold into slavery in Barbados. The war might have begun on Pym’s and Lord Saye’s colonial committee; for some it ended in the sugar-fields. Or forced into European exile on condition that they fought for the Republic of Venice. For some, the war began in admiration for La Serenissima; for others, it ended in fighting for her.
XXXI To Carisbrooke’s Narrow Case: Charles I in Captivity
By now Charles was spoken of by his foes as ‘Charles Stuart, the man of blood’. If he had been blamed for the first war, he was excoriated for the second. Understandably, the king was thinking about escape again. He found conditions intolerable. The bedlinen wasn’t changed often enough for a king and the wine was simply dreadful. But at least there was a miniature golf course within the grounds of the castle, and Governor Hammond also built him a bowling green. His coach was shipped to the island, and he used it to visit the sharp jutting rocks of the Needles. He liked to go for walks around the castle walls, and he kept up his reading. He made translations of Latin, but also devoured volumes of Lancelot Andrewes’s sermons and Herbert’s Divine Poems. He still loved romance, though, and read Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Tasso’s Godfrey of Bulloigne. Bacon’s Advancement of Learning was always at his side, and he liked to annotate it as he read. He also wrote, pouring out his own reactions to everything that had happened to him. Reams of self-justification flowed from his pen. He had no choice but to flee London, he explained, in order ‘not to prostitute the Majesty of my Place and Person, the
safety of my Wife and Children’. Henrietta’s departure had hurt him most, not because he missed her, but because of ‘the scandal of that necessity’. Brooding on his life, measuring himself by the common standards of manliness, Charles could see that he’d fallen short; he’d failed to protect his female dependant. He was equally upset by the publication of his letters after Naseby. He couldn’t understand why they had given offence; all they showed was ‘my constancy to my wife, the laws, and religion’. But he was not without real remorse for signing Strafford’s death warrant. Strafford, he felt, had abilities which ‘might make a Prince rather afraid than ashamed to employ him in the great affairs of state’. Like everyone involved in the wars, Charles hoped most of all to advise his son, to help avoid a repetition. He had many hopes for his son. Perhaps adversity might even help him, ‘as trees set in winter, then in warmth and serenity of time’ grow faster. Be Charles the Good, he told him, don’t try to be Charles the Great. In reaching out to the future, the king tried to allay his feeling of solitude, even abandonment.
He was scarcely alone, however; he was still attended by loyal servants, by his by-now-grown page; he had his tailor, David Murray; his barber, his butler (who was a spy, and conveyed Setters in Charles’s gloves) and his laundress, Mrs Wheeler, with her assistant Mary, as well as an aged retainer who carted coals. There were other helpful people in attendance, too, including the indefatigably loyal Jane Whorwood, and a range of go-betweens, including Major Bosville, who like Lear’s Kent managed to stay near his sovereign by disguising himself as a rustic. Charles was not the only one whose pre-war theatregoing seeped into his wartime thinking. One veteran of the king’s army, Captain Burly, staged a rising, marching on the castle accompanied only by a drummerboy and a few women. Parliament hanged Burly, and drew and quartered him too, for treason.
Mrs Dowcett, the kitchen clerk’s wife, sent her king a cheerful note to tell him that she had not been punished for smuggling his letters to the queen. Mary, the assistant laundress, was critical. She would enter his rooms during the day, when they were open and empty, bearing a load of clean linen, in it she would have concealed a letter, which could be hidden under a tapestry or carpet. ‘I know that nothing will come amiss when it comes in thy hand’, Charles wrote. In this way, the king’s confederates hatched a plan to make a hole in his ceiling through which he could make his way to an upper storey of the castle, one only lightly guarded. It was ingenious, but Hammond was a match for the plotters, and they were discovered. Hammond sacked Mrs Wheeler, and Mary too, and also Charles’s barber, who had nothing to do with the plot. Charles refused to let a Parliamentarian gambol about him with a razor; he let his hair and beard grow. He knew there was a boat waiting to take him to Southampton. He was ready to embark, leaning out the window, when he saw the castle weathervane swing around to the north. Now he was trapped on the island once more.
Charles learnt his lesson. From now on, he wrote his plans on tiny scraps of paper, some no more than one inch across; he also disguised his handwriting and used a cipher for key parts of his messages. Charles still loved disguise, play, theatre, and he was still fearful of being found out, scrutinized. Hammond searched his room, but Charles managed to hurl his papers on the fire. And when the thaw began, when the buds broke on the trees, Charles’s hopes too began to unfurl. The Scots were ready to cross the border and come to his aid, and in South Wales, troops under Colonel Poyer declared for the king; an Irish force was ready. Why should he compromise now? What he should do was escape.
He was communicating with Henry Firebrace, the slightly superannuated page, through a hole Firebrace had made in the wall of Charles’s bedroom; it was hidden by the hangings. Charles knew where to surmount the castle walls, and had been told that two horsemen would be waiting for him with three fast horses beyond the outer defences. He knew there was a boat waiting at the port to take him to the mainland. He knew too that he could easily get out of his bedchamber window; he’d tried the space with his head.
On the night of Monday 20 March 1648, Charles began his escape. His head went comfortably through the bars – but his rickety, inflexible body would not follow. For moments which seemed like hours, he was actually stuck, unable to withdraw his head or get his body further. Eventually, he was relieved to be back in his room.
He wrote to thank all those who had tried to help, and began to think about how he might weaken the bars. Perhaps nitric acid would do the trick. Jane Whorwood attempted to supply some, but it spilt on the long and rough journey from London. A fat plain man gave Charles equipment that let him turn two knifeblades into a saw, with which he did succeed in cutting one of his window bars, and more nitric acid was obtained locally. But by now so many people were in the know that it was almost inevitable that Hammond would become one of them. He acted promptly; he informed Parliament, Charles’s faithful servants thought of setting the castle on fire, and smuggling him out in the confusion. But in the end they decided instead to hide one of their number on the island. Firebrace was indefatigable; he suggested bringing to Carisbrooke a servant, Henry Chapman, dressed as a country gentleman, with a bushy false beard and a wig, white stockings and a big hat. The guards would remember this outlandish garb, and would forget to look at the face; then Charles could assume the same disguise and sidle out.
Charles loved the idea because it involved the theatrics and masquerading he adored. It was like the good old days of the Spanish Match. He called it ‘the most practicable’ of all Firebrace’s schemes. But Chapman couldn’t get past the guards. Other schemes foundered, or were uncovered by Hammond, or betrayed by those involved for sums of money that seemed trifling to the king, but handsome to servants. The fact that Charles insisted on writing letters to everyone, sometimes two a day to the same person, made secrecy impossible to sustain. Then the king heard the news of James’s escape, masterminded by Anne Halkett and her lover. Charles felt relieved, but his thirteen-year-old son’s success demeaned him; James had done what he could not.
The hot fires of rebellion had been lit everywhere, but they burned out quickly, leaving a deathly taste of ash. After this, there was real hatred, and it showed in the behaviour of both sides. For example, when Woodcraft House surrendered, the victorious Parliamentarians had thrown its master over the battlements, but Michael Hudson managed to grasp a drainage spout, and he hung on desperately kicking air. They hacked off his hands, and he plunged into the moat. Then they recovered his body, made sure he was dead with a musket blow to the head, and cut out his tongue. After that, what forgiveness could there be? Men who acted thus could only forgive themselves by blaming someone else; Charles had rejected what to the Army was the judgement of providence, given clearly in the First Civil War. Now his hands were incarnadine with the blood of his people.
Charles’s powerful position in spring had withered by the end of the summer of 1648, and he was transferred to a prison in Newport. On his last day on the island, he met the nine-year-old son of the master gunner, who was marching up and down the walls. Charles stopped his restless pacing to speak to the child; what are you doing, he asked the boy. Defending your majesty, the child replied. Charles patted his head, touched, but awkwardly patronizing, and gave the boy the ruby ring from his cravat.
A commission was sent to Newport, dominated by Charles’s sympathizers, the Presbyterians. It seemed a fine opportunity for compromise; the Army was away, fighting. But despite the weakness of his position, Charles still refused to take negotiation seriously. His friends worried that he was throwing away a last chance; they feared that the Independents were hanging on until Cromwell and Fairfax had finished their work in the field, and that once the Army was in control, they would break off the negotiations.
Charles too seemed to be playing for time, though no one was sure why. He made concessions, sometimes far-reaching ones, and then withdrew them the next day after discussions with his secretary, Sir Philip Warwick. One night he had to turn away from his staff to hide the tears which flowed
from his eyes. When the commissioners left, he made a speech in which he became the protagonist of a tragedy once more, this time a de casibus morality tale about the fall of the mighty: ‘My Lords, you are come to take your leave of me, and I believe that we shall surely never see one another again. But God’s will be done. I thank God I shall make my peace with him, and shall not fear whatsoever he shall suffer men to do unto me. You cannot but know that in my fall and ruin you see your own, and that also of those near to you. I pray you God sends you better friends than I have found.’
This penultimate remark shows that Charles was thinking of the Army. He was reasoning like any educated seventeenth-century man: ‘Take but degree away, untune that string/And hark what discord follows!’ By their refusal of his authority, Parliament had condemned themselves to the abrogation of their own by the Army. But in the king’s final remark his sense of isolation, his loneliness, are inscribed in large letters. Despite the brave devotion of his servants and helpers, Charles felt himself friendless.
His main hope was for an Irish rising, and he warned the queen not to be deceived by anything she might hear about concessions on Ireland. Perhaps he should escape? But Charles was again advised not to by Henrietta. He dreaded her anger, and stayed. He conceded Presbyterianism for three years, though he still refused utterly to take the Covenant, and continued to oppose the death penalty for any of his supporters, perhaps with the hangings of Capel, and most recently Holland, fresh in his mind. But he did concede that they should be punished and their estates reduced. By now he wasn’t even sure what he was trying to achieve, writing confusedly that he was so desperate to avoid returning to gaol that he was making concessions in the hope that he might escape, but now only escape and success could justify the concessions … ‘My only hope’, he wrote, despairingly, ‘is that now they believe I dare deny them nothing, and so be less careful of their guards.’ But Charles continued to deny them episcopacy, and the negotiations foundered quickly. He tried again to escape, but Hammond was two steps ahead of him at every moment. By now he had been warned that the Army wanted to put him on trial. He grew sadder and sadder.
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