When Charles I became a prisoner of the Scots army, Jermyn and the Queen ceased to be the King’s chief diplomatic agency and started, through pure necessity, to become the de facto Royalist government. From now on, it was they who directed policy and attempted to communicate it to the imprisoned King, rather than vice-versa.
Charles did not complain. His only grouse with them was that they did not write enough with news of his family. ‘Harry’, the King wrote in May 1645, ‘this is chiefly to chide you that I had no letters from you this last week… not to hear every day from you… is a cruel thing failing thereby of my expectation’.
As the Royalist cause foundered, an increasing number of Royalists came fleeing to Paris seeking sanctuary and support. Having grown used to managing their own small court in Paris, Jermyn and Henrietta Maria were now besieged by a host of Royalist exiles.
Jermyn’s signature, showing his fluid style of handwriting
Used to enjoying incomes from landed property, few of the exiles had the slightest idea of how to work for a living. They made constant demands on Henrietta Maria’s coffers. Many resented Jermyn’s control of the royal finances, moaning – not always without just cause – that ‘Lord Jermyn kept an excellent table for those who courted him, and had a coach of his own, and all other accommodations incident to the most full fortunes’.
Finding all the money and power in the hands of Jermyn and his favourites made many Royalists writhe with jealousy. There are numerous accounts of arguments between Royalists who were unable to put their differences aside even in the face of dire adversity.
At Saint-Germain in October 1645, for example, Jermyn had a furious argument with two of the Royalists with whom he had hatched the Army Plot of 1641, Wilmot and Percy. They alleged – absurdly – that Jermyn’s friend Prince Rupert had designs on the Crown. Rapiers flashed as they prepared to settle the argument with blood, jostling down the corridor until Henrietta Maria came running out of her chamber crying out for them to stop.
Exactly two years later, when Rupert came to blows with Secretary of State Digby over who was more responsible for the failure of the Royalist cause, Jermyn took the opportunity to express his own frustrations at the way he believed Digby had undermined his own efforts.
Rupert and the Secretary of State prepared to fight a duel early in the morning, at the Cross of Poissy in the autumnal forest of Saint-Germain, and Jermyn agreed readily to be the Prince’s second. He waited anxiously, ready with bandages and brandy in case Rupert was injured, hoping, despite their erstwhile friendship, that it would be Digby who would lose. At the last minute, and to Jermyn’s immense relief, the fight was averted by Prince Charles, who came galloping through the foggy dawn to stop them. But Jermyn and Digby’s already damaged friendship was now far beyond repair.
Back in England in 1647, King Charles I was a prisoner of the Presbyterian Scots. Yet he was still their king, and to a man they swore to put him back on his throne if only he would take the Covenant, by swearing to uphold and protect Presbyterianism in Scotland, and to impose it in England as well.
When the pragmatic Jermyn and Cardinal Mazarin heard this, they both urged him to acquiesce. But Charles refused. He had lost so much that his principles were, literally, all he had left. Rather sanctimoniously, Charles replied that his coronation oath to uphold the Church of England was inviolable.
Jermyn sent D’Avenant to try to persuade the King to change his mind. Charles merely told the poet that ‘Lord Jermyn knows nothing about religion!’. Jermyn then wrote the King a series of letters conjointly with John Colepeper the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and his Army Plot colleague, Jack Ashburnham. They tried every argument they could to make Charles back down, but without success. Clearly exasperated, they gave Charles a blunt ultimatum: be ‘a king of Presbytery, or no king at all’.
Finally, the Scots grew so fed up with Charles’s intransigence that, in one of the most bizarre twists of the Civil War, they sold him to Parliament for £400,000 and packed him off to London.
This coincided with a serious rift amongst Charles’s English enemies. Parliament wanted to disband its large, costly army. But the soldiers did not want to lose their jobs, whilst the generals feared a collapse in law and order if the army was no longer there.
On Thursday, 3 June, a soldier called Cornet Joyce arrived at Holdenby House, where Parliament was keeping Charles, and took him into military custody. Cromwell seems to have been complicit in this, because how he had control of the most important pawn in the British power-struggle – the King. The army began a slow march on London, side-stepping any serious efforts to resolve its differences with Parliament. On Friday, 6 August, Oliver Cromwell and his fellow generals entered London. Parliament could say what it liked, but now, with the army behind him, Cromwell had become the effective master of England.
Jermyn and Henrietta Maria were quick to realise the new, if highly unpalatable, opportunity that this offered them. From Paris, they sent Jack Ashburnham and Jermyn’s own cousin Sir John Berkeley with offers of almost unlimited wealth, lands and titles for Cromwell and his associates if they would only restore the King.
Like most of the gentry who had sided against the King, Cromwell was not a convinced anti-monarchist. He merely believed the King’s powers should not be absolute. He was now in a severe dilemma, but what helped convince him to refuse was his concern that the soldiers, who were strongly Republican, might turn on him.
But as the option of Cromwellian help faded, the possibility of help from Scotland suddenly re-emerged.
In December, helped by Ashburnham and Berkeley, Charles escaped to the Isle of Wight. Here, he met representatives of the Scottish Covenanters. Worn down by his recent captivity, Charles was finally prepared to do what Jermyn had been urging for over a year.
At Carisbrooke Castle on Boxing Day, 1647, which was a Sunday, Charles signed ‘The Engagement’, agreeing to abandon the Church of England and establish Presbyterianism in England for at least three years.
Discovering what had happened, the Castle’s governor arrested the King and sent a messenger to Cromwell. Desperate to save Charles, Jermyn ordered a ship to be sent from Jersey to whisk him away.
When it arrived, Charles tried to escape through a window, and nearly succeeded. But his foot got stuck, and he was apprehended. The ‘great Hell-cat’ Cromwell had the King in his claws once more. This time, he would not let Charles slip away.
Charles I was a prisoner again, but now Jermyn’s long-projected alliance between the Royalists and Scots Presbyterians had become official Royalist policy. Jermyn now made it the centre-piece of an elaborate new plan to win the war.
Through his agents Stephen Goffe and Sir Robert Moray, he encouraged his connections in Scotland, especially his old friend from the pre-Civil War court, the Marquess of Hamilton, to overrule Lord Argyll and bring the Covenanting army south to fight the New Model Army. To give the army a potent figurehead, Jermyn proposed to send Prince Charles to Scotland.
The pro-Anglican Privy Counsellors in exile in France, especially Secretary of State Nicholas and Sir Edward Hyde, were appalled at the danger of the enterprise, at the prospect of their Prince of Wales becoming a Presbyterian – and of Jermyn having such supreme control of Royalist policy.
In May 1648, when Jermyn wanted the Privy Council to approve his plans in practise, he had to resort to Machiavellian methods, calling a meeting so abruptly that those whom he knew would not agree with him could not make it.
At this time, a small fleet of English navy ships mutinied and offered their allegiance to the Royalist cause. Jermyn raised a personal loan from Venetian merchants to pay the sailors’ wages, took Prince Charles to Calais and put him aboard, ready to sail for Scotland when the time was right.
Through his quiet brother Thomas Jermyn, his suave old mentor Lord Kensington – he who had negotiated the marriage of Charles and Henrietta Maria – and many other friends in England, and benefiting greatly from his extensive communications network, Jermyn
was an important link in the chain of high-ranking Royalists who co-ordinated a series of Royalist risings from Pembroke to Kent. Meanwhile, the great army of Scots Presbyterians began to lumber south.
In Paris, Jermyn and Henrietta Maria prayed for victory. But on Thursday, 17 August, Cromwell fought a savage battle against the Scots at Preston, Lancashire, and won. The risings were too small and too few in number to be effective, and were brutally crushed by Cromwell’s troops. Amongst the prisoners taken were Lord Hamilton and Lord Kensington. They were taken to Tyburn and, kneeling side by side, their handsome, refined and infinitely noble heads were chopped off.
Prince Charles, thank goodness, was safe, for his little fleet had not sailed to Scotland, and now he was in Holland, wondering what to do next.
Another concern now raised itself, in the form of Cromwell’s attack on Guernsey. Acting on his own initiative, Prince Rupert sailed there, secured it for the King, and then landed in Ireland. All eyes now turned to Ireland, as the next, best hope for the King.
Raising another personal loan, Jermyn sent the Marquess of Ormonde, the former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, back to Ireland to make peace with the Confederation of Catholic lords at Kilkenny. Ormonde succeeded, writing triumphantly to Jermyn that Ireland was ‘ours’ at last and an army might at last be sent to England to save the King. ‘We must look upon your endeavours that are abroad’, Ormonde added, ‘to furnish us in the best proportion you are able, as well with money as with ammunition’.
This Jermyn started to do at once. But having worked tirelessly throughout the Civil War to help save the King, time had run out. Due in part to these very same Royalist efforts, Cromwell and his cronies had concluded that there could be no peace in England while Charles remained a focus for unrest. In December, the army, with Cromwell’s subsequent approval, purged Parliament of all members likely not to acquiesce to their wishes.
On Monday, 1 January 1649, at the generals’ behest, the Commons declared it treasonous for the King to levy war on his own Parliament and kingdom, and put their anointed sovereign on trial.
Charles I, King of England and Scotland, was tried in Westminster Hall. On Saturday, 27 January, he was found guilty of having made war on his own people in order to further his own ends.
Three days later, he left St James’s Palace for the last time and walked across the frosty grass of St James’s Park to the Banquetting House in Whitehall. The Banquetting House had been built by Inigo Jones for James I, thirty years before. Now, a hastily assembled scaffold loomed up against the building’s elegant classical façade.
The King’s last act was to make sure his hair was tucked under his cap, so as not to obstruct the single, deadly blow that cut off his head.
Cromwell was installed as President of the Council of State, the body that now assumed the sovereignty of the realm. For the first and only time in history, Britain was a republic: and Oliver Cromwell was its leader.
Jermyn had lost the struggle to save Charles I. But now he had a new mission to fulfil. It was one of extraordinary magnitude and audacity: to destroy Cromwell’s fledgling republic and enthrone the young Prince Charles – the man who was so widely rumoured to be his own son – as Charles II, ruling monarch of England and Scotland.
XIII
‘OUR OWN CONDITION IS LIKE TO BE VERY SAD’. 1649 – 1656
Jermyn in whom united doth remain,
All that kind Mothers wishes can contain;
In whom Wit, Judgment, Valour, Goodness join,
And all these through a comely Body shine,
A Soul composed of th’ Eagle and the Dove;
Which all men must admire, and all men love.
Abraham Cowley, The Civil War (1643).
Even before Charles I’s execution and the foundation of the first non-monarchical government in British history, Jermyn and Henrietta Maria’s world was shaken by revolutionary events much nearer their own door.
For the last half a decade, resentment had been building up in all classes of French society against the First Minister, Cardinal Mazarin’s on-going policy of centralising power under the Crown.
In the months leading up to Charles’s execution in England, the autocratic Prince of Condé led an armed rebellion in France, aimed at forcing Queen Anne to dismiss Mazarin. The rebellion was termed ‘the Fronde’, from the French for ‘sling’, alluding to the way naughty boys only use their toy slings when the teacher’s back is turned. Paris degenerated into anarchy and Anne fled with her court up to Saint-Germain. Henrietta Maria, Jermyn and their household in the Louvre found themselves blockaded inside the turbulent city.
‘Our own condition is like[ly] to be very sad’, Cowley wrote from the Louvre on Monday, 8 January 1649, ‘the Queen being left here without one penny of money to buy her bread tomorrow. Yesterday my Lord [Jermyn] went to St Germain’s with an intent to return this morning, but is not yet come back, neither have we heard from him’.
Soon after Cowley wrote this, Henrietta Maria wrapped herself in a servant’s cloak and slipped out of the palace, holding her little daughter Henrietta Anne’s hand. But the Parisian constables recognised her distinctive stoop as she hurried through the Tuileries Gardens and sent her home brusquely. Jermyn reached the Louvre soon afterwards too, tired and empty-handed, for Queen Anne had had no spare money to give him.
A month later, freezing cold and with their gold exhausted and their soup in terribly short supply, Jermyn and his friends were reduced to breaking up the remaining furniture in the Louvre to fuel the dwindling embers in the fireplaces.
News of Charles I’s execution eventually filtered through to Jermyn, on Thursday, 8 February. To seventeenth-century Royalists like Jermyn, the act of beheading an anointed sovereign – his anointed sovereign – was unthinkable. On a purely personal level, though, and however dreadful he may have felt as a result, is it conceivable he was secretly pleased that now there was nobody who could come between himself and Henrietta Maria?
But if so, that satisfaction lay in the future. For the present he was faced with a terrible prospect: breaking the news to the Queen.
He started doing so while they ate their meagre breakfast. But once he had told her about Charles being led on foot to an execution block outside the Banqueting House, the look of blank dismay in her eyes made him falter.
Anything was preferable to telling her the truth. Instead he told her that the crowd had cried out in protest against the abominable act that was about to take place. By weight of numbers they had overpowered the soldiers, freed the King and carried him away to safety.
Henrietta Maria told him to send a messenger to Saint-Germain to see if Anne had heard any more news. Jermyn pretended to send the messenger, and then asked one of the household priests, Père Cyprian Gamache, to help him tell the Queen the truth.
After fretting through the dismal afternoon, they sat down to supper with the Queen. At first they talked about trivialities and the Queen started to cheer up. Then she complained of the messenger’s failure to return. Gamache, to whom we owe the story of that dreadful day, describes what happened next:
Lord Jermyn took this opportunity to suggest that the gentleman was so faithful and so expeditious in obeying her Majesty’s commands on these occasions, that he would not have failed to come, had he any favourable intelligence. What then is the news? I see it is known to you, said the Queen.
Lord Jermyn replied, that he did know something of it, and when pressed, after many evasions, to explain himself, and many ambiguous words to prepare her, little by little, to receive the fatal intelligence, at length he declared it to the Queen, who seemed not to have expected anything of the kind, [and] was so deeply struck, that instantly, entirely speechless, she remained voiceless and motionless, to all appearances a statue, without words and without tears. A great philosopher has said that ordinary griefs allow the heart to sigh, and the lips to murmur; but that extraordinary afflictions, terrible and fatal, cast the soul into stupor, and by locking up the
senses, make the tongue mute, and the eyes tearless.
To this pitiable state was the Queen reduced, and to all our exhortations and arguments she was deaf and insensible. We were obliged to cease talking, and we remained by her in unbroken silence, some weeping, some sighing, and all with sympathising countenances, mourning over her extreme distress. This sad scene lasted till night-fall, when the Duchess of Vendôme, whom she greatly loved, came to see her. Weeping, she took the hand of the Queen, tenderly kissed it, and afterwards spoke so successfully that she seemed to have recovered this dislocated Princess from that loss of all her senses, or rather, that great and sudden stupor, produced by the surprising and lamentable intelligence of the strange death of the King.
Dare we presume to wonder if it was her guilty knowledge of earlier infidelities with Jermyn that made Henrietta Maria turn to the Duchess, and not to him? Almost at once, at any rate, she left the Louvre for the Carmelite convent in the rue Saint-Jacques, where she remained for several weeks, crying into her black lace vale, and praying fervently for her late husband’s soul.
Then Henrietta Maria came home again, to be by Jermyn’s side, and the gossips started whispering. Madame de Motteville, who visited the Queen that spring, thought that the presence of ‘le Favori’ was making Henrietta Maria much happier than she ought to have been. In the streets the rebel Frondeurs read malicious pamphlets comparing Anne’s fondness for Mazarin with Jermyn and Henrietta Maria’s ‘shameful attachment’ that, they asserted, had led to Charles I’s downfall.
Before long, rumours arose of a private marriage contracted at the Louvre between the widowed queen and her favourite. A French courtier, Madame Bavière, wrote that they ‘made a clandestine marriage’ soon after the King’s execution.
The diarist Sir John Reresby, who visited Jermyn and Henrietta Maria in 1659, believed a story that they were married and had had children. In 1662, Pepys heard the marriage had taken place ‘for certain’, adding ‘her being married to my lord of St. Albans is commonly talked of’. In 1685, a story was printed that Cowley had witnessed the wedding. In the early nineteenth century, an antiquarian claimed to have heard of a marriage settlement between Jermyn and Henrietta Maria which Cowley had witnessed, adding that the signatures were subsequently – and most conveniently – cut off. In 1690 claims were made that one ‘R. Osborne’ had seen the couple ‘solemnly married together’ in Paris.
The King's Henchman Page 17