From which of either’s loving heart they came.
That is exactly the problem faced by historians and biographers reading Henrietta Maria’s letters from this period – and a problem deftly sidestepped by them all, for they generally ignore Jermyn altogether. Yet in fact there is no problem at all. To try to make sense of Henrietta Maria’s actions without Jermyn, or vice versa, is impossible. From now on, most of the time, Jermyn and Henrietta Maria would unite to present the world with a resilient, dynamic front.
On Friday, 22 August 1642, Charles I unfurled his standard at Nottingham. News reached Holland. The Civil War had begun.
On hearing the news of the outbreak of the Civil War, Jermyn and Henrietta Maria hired two hundred soldiers in the southern province of Zeeland and engaged eighteen ships to carry them and a large supply of ammunition to Portsmouth, where George Goring, who had decided after all to side with the Crown, was now being besieged by Parliamentarians.
Just as the Queen and Jermyn’s ships were ready to sail, however, the local authorities impounded them. When Jermyn went to Zeeland himself to protest, the authorities took malicious pleasure in throwing the handsome Cavalier into prison. It was not until mid-September that the Prince of Orange managed to secure Jermyn’s release and also to enable the ships to set sail for England.
Other vessels set out too to bolster the northern army, which was now commanded by the Earl of Newcastle. One vessel carrying the unfortunate D’Avenant was captured at Yarmouth. After that, the wind changed and the remainder of Henrietta Maria’s fleet tossed uselessly at anchor at Hellevoetsluis.
It must have been an extraordinary feeling for Jermyn to stand on the low dunes at Hellevoetsluis, gazing out across the Haringvliet, one of the branching mouths of the mighty Rhine, as it poured into the North Sea near The Hague. In front of him swayed a forest of bobbing masts, whilst the air was full of the sounds of creaking timbers, the slapping of rope against mast, and the wind whistling through the furled sails. Five hundred and seventy eight years earlier Duke William had assembled his fleet of ships further down the coast in Normandy and sailed out to conquer England. Some two thousand years before that, they believed, Trojan Brutus had beached his black ships on Devon’s shores, to rid fair Albion of giants. Now, Jermyn and Henrietta Maria were braced to embark on an enterprise that seemed to them no less audacious – to wrest their country from the grip of Parliament.
But it was not until January 1643 that Jermyn and the Queen, pacing frustratedly about their temporary home, the New Palace in The Hague, were finally told the wind had changed. On Thursday, 19 January, they hastened along the coast to Scheveningen, the fishing village that doubled up as The Hague’s harbour. Here, they climbed aboard the Princess Royal, weighed anchor and set out across the rolling seas.
Together with eleven transport ships and Admiral Tromp’s escort of Dutch warships they ploughed steadily northwest across the North Sea.
All went well until they drew near the English coast. Then the sky darkened and a gale started to tear at the ships’ sails. At one point they could even see the Yorkshire coastline between the towering waves. Below the decks the noise of the sea hissing and crashing was almost drowned by the shrieks of the Queen’s attendants, women and men alike.
Only Henrietta Maria and Jermyn remained calm. God had never allowed an English queen to drown, she told Jermyn cheerfully, and he was unlikely to start now. She was right. Their nine-day voyage ended when they were swept back into Scheveningen terrified and exhausted, their clothes caked in salt.
After two weeks the wind relented. Gathering together their traumatised household they set out again. The weather was calmer now and, on Friday, 10 February, Henrietta Maria and Henry Jermyn stepped onto the stone quay of the Yorkshire fishing port of Bridlington.
Later that day, Lord Newcastle, commander of the King’s northern army, rode into Bridlington. After a celebratory meal, they settled down to sleep in a house near the quayside.
At five in the morning Jermyn awoke to the sound of cannons booming out at sea and cannon balls crashing into the nearby houses. News of their arrival had reached the Parliamentarians. During the night, a squadron of Parliamentarian ships had sailed up to the harbour and had now opened fire.
Dragging Henrietta Maria out of bed, Jermyn ran with her down stairs and out of the front door. Suddenly, she gave a cry, turned round and dashed back upstairs. To the astonished Jermyn, she shouted that she could not leave her little lapdog Mitte behind in such dangerous circumstances. She emerged a minute later, the ugly little dog tucked safely under her arm.
They ran together through the dark night, crouched low to avoid the cannon balls that whistled past their heads. One servant collapsed when a bullet struck him. Jermyn and Henrietta Maria threw themselves into an icy ditch, gasping for breath, their hearts pounding in their ears.
There they hid until Admiral Tromp manoeuvred his ships around to return fire. If it was not for him, they might have been captured. But thanks to the Dutch cannons, the sails of the Parliamentarian ships disappeared at last into the dank fog of the January dawn.
Drying off their armaments and mustering their bedraggled household, Jermyn, Henrietta Maria and their officers rode three miles inland to Boynton Hall.
Here, they began recruiting soldiers. The local gentry, many of whom were Catholics, flocked to them with more men, arms and horses. When they marched to York, even more Yorkshiremen came to swell their ranks.
Taking command of the ancient city, that had once been the capital of Roman Britain, they sent their troops to help Lord Newcastle drive General Fairfax’s Parliamentarian army out of the county. But before they were able to complete the task Charles, whose own army was under threat in Oxford, ordered them to come south.
On Tuesday, 23 May, the newly-promoted Colonel Henry Jermyn proudly unfurled the new flag of the Queen’s Lifeguards. On its red field was a single gold fleur-de-lys, representing Henrietta Maria’s native France, surmounted by the golden crown of the Queen of England. Some five thousand foot soldiers and fifty companies of cavalry and dragoons, led by a mixture of French and English officers, marched out of the southern gate of York.
Their horses and oxen strained to pull six cannons, two mortars and a hundred and fifty wagons of baggage and powder. Precious too were their supplies of matches that, in the days before flintlocks, were used to light the gunpowder that fired cannon and musket balls alike.
Their friend Will Crofts, whose family were Suffolk neighbours of the Jermyns, held his head up proudly as the regiment’s new Lieutenant Colonel. But most excited of all was Henrietta Maria, the ‘she-majesty generalissima’, as she described herself proudly in a letter to Charles, ‘over all’. She was not playing at being a general: the daughter of the great warrior-king of France, Henri IV, she really was one. Gone were her gilded carriages. Now, she rode on horseback alongside Jermyn in wind and rain, eating her meals at a simple table within sight of her soldiers.
‘Generalissima’, sneered the Parliamentarian pamphleteers ‘and next to herself, Harry’. But for all their enemies’ scorn, their march south was a conspicuous success. The Parliamentarian garrison of Burton-on-Trent opened the town’s gates to them, ‘and at Nottingham’, wrote the Queen, ‘we had the experience that one of our troops had beaten six of theirs, and made them fly’.
On Sunday, 18 June, their brave flag fluttered over the town of Newark. They paused there to refurbish their supplies and recruit new soldiers.
This delay was a mistake, for it meant they did not reach Tamworth in time to stop it falling into Parliamentarian hands. But ‘it is not a great matter’, Henrietta Maria told Lord Newcastle, optimistically, for ‘it will not prevent me from going on Wednesday to join the King. To-morrow, I will send you my cipher; it is Jermyn’s fault that you have not had it’, she added, ‘for I had given it to him to copy’.
Just as the Royalists quickly earned the nickname ‘Cavaliers’ – from the French word for mounted warrio
rs, so too did their adversaries acquire a sobriquet – ‘Roundheads’. It is often thought this came from the rounded helmets they wore, but in fact the term was coined by Henrietta Maria herself. One day, watching Strafford’s trial in Parliament, she had seen Pym’s pudding-bowl haircut, and asked ‘who is that round-headed man?’. The term was later being expanded from Pym to encompass the soldiers who supported his cause.
Now, it was these very Roundheads, led by Lord Essex, whose superior numbers now threatened Jermyn and Henrietta Maria, as they hurried south-west towards Stratford-on-Avon, where they hoped to meet Prince Rupert.
The two Royalist forces rendezvoused at Stratford on Wednesday, 12 July. The excitable teenager who had shared his dreams of Madagascar with Jermyn was now a dashing Royalist general and already one of the Roundheads’ deadliest enemies.
That night they sat down to a triumphant dinner in the house where Shakespeare had lived and died, and were waited on by the playwright’s granddaughter.
Two days later they entered Kineton Vale below Edgehill, their splendid banners fluttering under a broad blue July sky, and saw Charles riding towards them, flanked by crowds of courtiers including an effusive Endymion Porter.
Beyond them lay Oxford, a city that had remained staunchly loyal to the King. On Friday, 14 July, they rode triumphantly past the trenches and earthen ramparts that encircled the great city of learning, while the crowds threw their hats in the air with joy.
The first thing Henrietta Maria asked Charles to do when she reached Oxford was for Jermyn to be made a baron.
This was no mere act of empty gratitude. Being ennobled would entitle Jermyn to sit in the House of Lords. But, more pertinently, it would guarantee him a swift beheading, rather than a lengthy death by hanging, drawing and quartering, should Parliament ever capture him. It seems unlikely that Jermyn himself ever seriously contemplated such a fate – his dogged determination to win the war could brook no possibility of failure – but at least Henrietta Maria could feel that, for once, she had done something to protect him from the worst excesses of Parliamentarian vengeance.
On Friday, 8 September 1643, at the stamp of the King’s seal on the letters patent, Colonel Henry Jermyn became Henry, Baron Jermyn of St Edmundsbury in the County of Suffolk. Four months later, Henrietta Maria made a more personal affirmation of his unique position of trust by making him her Lord Chamberlain, and thus placing him in complete overall control of her entire household.
Their arrival at Oxford with a fresh regiment was most timely. Their men, officers, arms and ammunition, all brought successfully from Holland via Yorkshire, freed Charles from having to remain holed up in the town’s ramparts. During the remainder of the summer the King, and Rupert, marched through Somerset, capturing Bristol and laying siege to Gloucester. With Lord Essex’s advance, however, the King was forced to withdraw and both sides started a desperate race back towards London – and it looked as if Essex might win.
As the Parliamentary forces neared Newbury, Lord Jermyn raised his standard once again and rode out of Oxford at the head of his regiment, intending to delay Essex, while the Royalist army caught up.
While Henrietta Maria fretted anxiously in the oak-panelled lodgings which she shared with Jermyn in Merton College, her new Lord Chamberlain marched his men along the winding lanes of Berkshire and down into Wiltshire. Essex reached Swindon on Sunday, 17 September and the next day Jermyn encountered a detachment of Roundheads on the stubble fields of Aldbourne Chase. At last, the heroic champion of Madagascar had real enemies to fight.
Instead of Endymion Porter and Rupert, however, Jermyn was flanked by the Marquess de Vieuville, the leading French officer who had accompanied them from Holland, and George Digby. The son of Lord Bristol, and Jermyn’s old friend from the Madrid embassy, Digby was now a grown man, ‘graceful and beautiful… of great eloquence and becomingness in his discourse, save that he sometimes seemed a little affected’. He had started his Parliamentary career siding with Pym, but had rapidly changed sides and was now an ardent Royalist.
Jermyn drew his rapier and gave the order to attack. With musket balls whistling past their ears, the Cavaliers charged forward to engage Essex’s infantry at close quarters.
Once, a Parliamentarian officer, anonymous behind the sinister iron grill of his helmet, fired his pistol point-blank at Digby. Urging his horse forward, Jermyn ran the officer through with his sword and, turning, must have been relieved to see Digby, his big elegant face flushed scarlet, alive and unhurt. Suddenly, there came cries from the rear. Essex’s cavalry had made their way round behind them. The foot soldiers of the Queen’s Regiment, fearful of being trampled to death, were fleeing.
Jermyn and his officers found themselves trapped, guns and pikes before them and cavalry to the rear. Conferring hastily, they agreed that it would be both honourable and probably somewhat safer to charge forward into the enemy’s infantry than try to retreat. Their colours flying – four of Jermyn’s standard-bearers had not fled – they charged forward shouting their war-cry ‘God for Queen Mary!’, the English version of the name of their heroine, Henrietta Maria herself.
Leaning down from their saddles they slashed their rapiers at any Roundheads bold enough to stand in their way. It was a terrifying spectacle for both sides: a mass of darkly-clad Roundhead foot soldiers surrounding a small party of brightly-dressed Cavaliers, their swords dripping with blood as their chargers reared and pounded their way forward.
Within sight of clear ground Jermyn felt a searing pain in his arm as a bullet penetrated his sleeve. Despite this, he managed to keep his grip on the reigns. Another pistol bullet struck Vieuville, piercing straight through his gleaming breastplate. The marquess slumped over his horse’s neck and fell to the ground, dead. Goaded by anger, Jermyn and the other remaining Royalists cut their way through the last ranks of the enemy and galloped away, bullets raining down around them.
So perilous was the danger and so brave the escape that even Jermyn’s harshest of critics, the brilliant lawyer Edward Hyde, soon to become Charles I’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, praised ‘the excellent temper of his arms’. The poet Abraham Cowley was carried away by the excitement. What was a formidable army to Jermyn, he asked? ‘He charged it through; with unfeared noise the bullets round him flew’. Unless the adrenaline-rush had overpowered Jermyn completely, he would have been terrified. But he had survived and brought his horse clattering back into the courtyard of Merton College.
Henrietta Maria tended to his wounded arm as best she and the academics of Oxford could. For days, Jermyn lay in bed, sweating and delirious. But at last the fever passed, and the wound healed without developing an infection, or the need for agonising amputation.
Meanwhile, after the skirmish at Aldbourne Chase, the armies had regrouped. Jermyn’s men joined with the King and Rupert, to meet Essex’s Roundheads in the Battle of Newbury. Essex scored a significant victory, not by any means destroying the King’s forces, but halting any hope of advancing on London that season.
Although he was later to write proudly of the courage of ‘my troopes’, Jermyn never fought again. His regiment, under another commander, was annihilated at the battle of Shelford House in 1645. Yet just because Jermyn never fought in another Civil War battle does not mean his part in the conflict was at an end.
In the history of the bitter struggle between King Charles I and Parliament, Jermyn’s involvement had only just begun.
IX
‘THE STRONGEST PILLAR IN THE LAND’ 1644
Fair as unshaded light; or as the day
In its first birth, when all the year was May;
Sweet, as the altar’s smoke, or as the new
Unfolded bud, swelled by the early dew;
Smooth, as the face of waters first appeared,
Ere tides began to strive, or winds were heard;
Kind, as the willing saints, but calmer far
Than in their sleeps forgiven hermits are:
You that are more th
an our discreter fear
Dares praise, with such dull art, what make you here?
Sir William D’Avenant, ‘To the Queen…’, 1637.
In the winter the roads became so waterlogged that soldiers could sink up to their knees in mud. The harsh frosts bit through the thickest cloaks.
Because of this, armies rarely campaigned during the winter months.
As soon as the autumn fogs began to settle, the opposing armies ensconced themselves in their winter quarters. At the King’s base at Oxford all the colleges and houses rang with the rousing songs of the Royalist officers and their wives, while the hovels of the poor were overcrowded with carousing infantrymen.
In Merton College near the River Thames, which is what Oxford’s dons call the River Isis, the newly ennobled Lord Jermyn drank and sang with old friends and made new ones. Amongst the latter was a young man called Abraham Cowley. The son of a London grocer, Cowley was destined to become just as popular a poet in his own time as D’Avenant, although neither would remain so well known in later centuries: their poetry was primarily for their own age, rather than for all time.
Cowley had already met Jermyn’s cousin John Hervey of Ickworth. Through Hervey, he was now introduced to Jermyn himself. Cowley was immediately drawn to the imposingly-built Cavalier who had devoted his life to the service of the Queen of England.
There is a story that exists in several incarnations, set in various places, and concerning either the King or Prince Charles. One version places it in Oxford, at this time, and concerns the King, Jermyn and Cowley, and is as follows.
It so happened, one day, that Charles I followed a common aristocratic practise of the time, by trying to divine his future by pointing at random to a passage of Virgil’s Aeneid, that stirring tale of how Aeneas had left the burning ruins of Troy, and journeyed across the Mediterranean to found a Trojan colony in Italy, from which would emerge the great city of Rome. Charles picked some lines that happened to be the lines spoken by Queen Dido of Carthage when, finding that Aeneas must abandon her, in order to continue his divinely-ordained mission, she laid a terrible curse upon him. None of them could agree on a lyrical translation, so Jermyn sent it to Cowley, and this is what the poet wrote:
The King's Henchman Page 13