The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain

by Allan Massie

  In the early years of the war, the royalist cavalry were superior to their opponents. They were commanded by the King’s nephew, Prince Rupert, second son of Elizabeth of Bohemia. Though only in his early twenties, Rupert had studied war, and had some little experience of it. Tall, handsome, dashing, he was an inspiring figure and one who was feared by the parliamentary forces. He was the ‘Devil-Prince’, his white poodle Boy, who travelled everywhere with him, said to be his familiar spirit by means of whom he communicated with his satanic master. The war might have gone better for Charles had he entrusted its entire management to Rupert. But there were jealousies and divisions in the camp, and the vigour with which Rupert prosecuted the war alarmed those who hoped for a negotiated peace.

  The royalists’ best chance of victory came and went in the early weeks of the war. The Battle of Edgehill in September 1642 is judged to have been inconclusive, for after Rupert’s cavalry had swept their opponents from the field, the parliamentary infantry held firm. Yet though there was no decisive victory for either side, Essex, commanding Parliament’s army, withdrew and left the road to London open. Rupert was all for an immediate attack on the capital, but more timid counsels prevailed, and the opportunity to end the war quickly was lost. The following year Rupert stormed Bristol, the second city in England, and again a concerted attack on London seemed possible. But the chance was frittered away. The royalists dissipated their efforts when they should have concentrated them. So in the north, the Earl of Newcastle besieged Hull, in the west the King besieged Gloucester, and Sir Ralph Hopton’s victorious Cornish army turned back to their homeland.

  The King based himself at Oxford, not yet known as the ‘home of lost causes’. He lodged at Christ Church, and the district opposite its gates, St Aldates, was packed with courtiers, royal servants and soldiers. John Aubrey recalled: ‘I was wont to go to Christ-church to see King Charles I at supper. Where I once heard him say, “That as he was hawking in Scotland. He rode into the Quarry, and found a Covey of Partridge falling upon the hawk.” When I came to my chamber I told this story to my tutor. Said he, “That covey was London.”’13

  Charles’s dignity and self-control won him the admiration of those who came close to him in the war years, but he was not a good commander-in-chief. Instead of issuing orders he too often made suggestions, and even those were not always clear. ‘Though I may propose many things,’ he wrote to Newcastle, who was commanding the royalist forces in the north, ‘yet I shall not impose anything upon you; as, for example, I hear General King is come; now I desire you to make use of him in your army. I am sure you have not good commanders to spare, no more than arms, yet I confess there may be such reasons as make this desire of mine impossible’ – a letter that may have left Newcastle scratching his head.14

  His enemies might already call him ‘the Man of Blood’, but a letter to the mayor of Newbury after the first battle fought there in 1643 shows a tender, paternal side to Charles’s nature: ‘Our will and command is, that you forthwith send into the towns and villages adjacent, and bring thence all the sick and hurt soldiers of the Earl of Essex’s army; and though they be rebels, and deserve the punishment of traitors, yet out of our tender compassion upon them as being our subjects, our will and pleasure is, that you carefully provide for their recovery, as well as for those of our own army, and then send them to Oxford.’15

  The parties in England were evenly matched – more than a third of the members of the House of Commons, once all but unanimous in opposition to the King, had now attached themselves to the royalist side. Both sought an alliance that might tip the balance in their favour, and so looked to Scotland. Parliament had more to offer, for they seemed willing to satisfy the religious demands of the Covenanters as Charles was not. Like the King, the Covenanters believed in the need for uniformity of religion (which entailed the freedom to persecute those who were not of their mind), and so were convinced that the settlement they had secured as a result of their defiance of the King required that England too should adopt the Presbyterian form of Church government. Accordingly, in the treaty they signed with Parliament, which is known as the Solemn League and Covenant (1643), they bound their new allies, as they supposed, to impose Presbyterianism on England in exchange for military assistance now. The Covenanters’ demands were arrogant and unrealistic. While most of the parliamentary leaders favoured the Presbyterian form of Church government, there was no majority for this in England. There was not even a majority for it among those to whom they were now allied, for many in the army were Independents, not Presbyterians; that is, they accepted no overall system of Church government, but believed that each parish or congregation should order worship and practise the faith as it thought fit. This opinion was anathema to the Scots Kirk. Meanwhile, all that held Presbyterians and Independents together was suspicion of the King, antipathy to bishops, and fear and loathing of Roman Catholics.

  The Covenanting army crossed the border. It was commanded now by David Leslie, another veteran of the Swedish army, a distant cousin of the Earl of Leven. Leven served on his cousin’s staff, thus breaking the promise he had made to Charles. The arrival of the Covenanters tilted the balance of power in the north. The Earl of Newcastle was besieged in York. Rupert, who had been campaigning in Lancashire, crossed the Pennines to relieve the city. Then, despite Newcastle’s reluctance, he sought battle in the hope of winning a decisive victory. Rupert believed this was in accordance with the instructions given him by the King, though Charles’s letter had been characteristically ambiguous. But Newcastle was right, Rupert wrong. The royalists were outnumbered and ill prepared for battle. Moreover, the parliamentary army attacked in the early evening when their enemy supposed there would be no fighting till the morning. This was the Battle of Marston Moor, on the evening of 2 July 1644, and was the first in which Oliver Cromwell’s newly trained cavalry, the Ironsides, proved their quality. The royalists suffered a shattering defeat. The north was lost. Newcastle, in despair, went into exile, but Rupert rallied his troops and resumed the war.

  The advantage had now swung against Charles and would swing further the following year when, on 14 June, he suffered another heavy defeat at Naseby in Northamptonshire, and the war in England was effectively lost. But before then a remarkable campaign in Scotland offered a gleam of light. It seemed for a few weeks that Scotland might be won back for the King. This had appeared highly unlikely; the grip of the Covenanted Kirk was secure. But Charles had made the Marquis of Montrose his lieutenant-general. The appointment had been too long delayed. Indeed, in February 1643, before the Solemn League and Covenant had been signed, Montrose had tried to persuade the Queen, lately returned with supplies from Holland, that, as Henry Guthrie related, ‘although the king’s enemies in Scotland did not as yet profess so much, they certainly intended to carry an army into England, and to join with the king’s enemies there; and, for remedy, offered, that if the king would grant a commission, himself, and many more, would take the field and prevent it’. Unfortunately for the royal cause, the Queen, who disliked Montrose, preferred the advice of the ineffectual Hamilton, who undertook ‘that without raising arms for the king, he should make that party [the Covenanters] lie quiet, and not list an army for England’. Hamilton failed in this as in most things he attempted, and so it was only after great damage had been done by the Scots to the King’s cause in England that Montrose at last slipped into Scotland with only two companions and made for the Highlands to raise troops.16

  The ‘Year of Miracles’ that followed is almost peripheral to Charles’s story, for while it briefly revived his hope of victory, it served no purpose in the end. And yet its effect was to be enduring, for the loyalty to the Stuarts displayed in later generations by so many in the Highlands owed much to the memory of Montrose and the legend of his year of astonishing victories.

  Montrose was that rarest of political beings: a man hot for moderation. He had been a Covenanter, and he never departed from the view that the National Covenant w
as justified; but it was not long before he concluded that the Covenant, which was intended to rectify the balance in the state, now itself threatened to disturb it. While Charles had previously exceeded his prerogative, the latter was now being infringed by the Parliament in England and the Kirk and its supporters in Scotland. Montrose’s position was therefore the same as Hyde’s.

  When he crossed the border in August 1644, his enterprise seemed hopeless. He brought no troops; Charles had none to spare him. Somewhere in the west or central Highlands there was, he knew, a force of Ulster Macdonalds, Catholics and rare fighting men. They were commanded by one Alasdair, and were the remnant of a force promised by the Earl of Antrim. Alasdair is the hero of the year in Gaelic legend, and it may be that Montrose’s biographer, Wishart, his chaplain, does not give the Ulsterman all the credit he is due. Yet claims for Alasdair are exaggerated. In his career he showed boundless courage, but no evidence of strategic or even tactical grasp, except for his year under Montrose’s command.

  In twelve months Montrose with his little army, shifting in composition and never amounting to more than five thousand men, won seven battles. The last of these, at Kilsyth, made him master of Scotland. He planned to summon a free parliament and to lead an army into England to revive the King’s battered cause. But now the bubble burst. His army, after the manner of Highland armies, scattered. Alasdair led off his Macdonalds to pursue a private vendetta in the west – though he promised to return. Montrose, hoping to raise more troops in the Borders, had hardly begun the task when on 13 September 1645 he was surprised at Philiphaugh outside Selkirk by David Leslie at the head of a battle-hardened force of some six thousand men. Montrose had perhaps a quarter that number and his little army was scattered. He escaped to the Highlands, while the Covenanters honoured their grim God Jehovah by slaughtering three hundred Irishwomen who had been among Montrose’s camp followers. ‘The lord’s work gangs merrily on,’ said one minister of the Kirk. Even Leslie, with his experience of the frightful German wars, was disgusted. ‘Have you not had your fill of blood?’ he asked another of the ministers. The answer was no.

  With Montrose’s defeat the last hope vanished. There was little left of the royalists as a fighting force. Rupert went into exile, acquired a few ships, and harried the parliamentary fleet as vigorously as he had led cavalry charges. But this was more like piracy than war. In May 1646 Charles rode out of Oxford in disguise and made his way to Newark, where the castle, still held for the King, was being besieged by the Scots army commanded by Leven since David Leslie’s return north. Charles rode into the Scots’ camp and surrendered his person, then ordered the garrison of the castle to open the gates. It was the end of the war.

  Charles was in effect a prisoner, but he was still king, and treated as such. Throughout the war his enemies had maintained that they were acting in the real interest of the Crown (which Charles mysteriously failed to understand) as well as the country, and Parliament had refrained from giving the title of acts to the measures it had passed, for an act required the royal assent. Instead they had issued what they called ‘ordinances of the two houses’. As for the Scots, in whose camp Charles would remain for six months, the affairs of Scotland had been settled to their satisfaction in 1641 when the bishops had been removed and the Presbyterian establishment confirmed. They had entered the war as allies of Parliament because they feared that a royalist victory would see the 1641 settlement overturned again. But there was no danger of that now that the King was beaten. Still, they weren’t satisfied. The Solemn League and Covenant had, as they believed, promised that Presbyterianism would be established in England too, and this they regarded as a guarantee that there could be no repeat of the Laudian experiment in Scotland. There should be two kingdoms, but the same style of Church government in each. Their hope remained wildly unrealistic, for the New Model Army of Fairfax and Cromwell continued to consist mainly of Independents. The Scots held the King as a valuable bargaining chip, but they were pursuing a chimera in their insistence that the provisions of their agreement with the English parliament should be enacted. To their mind, indeed, the Covenant was first with God, only secondly with Englishmen. As for the Independents, they were as loathsome to the Kirk as were bishops, for their demands would lead to what the ministers of the Kirk elegantly denounced as ‘the vomit of toleration’.

  The King endured boredom in the Scots camp, being plagued by lengthy prayers and sermons from the ministers; boredom and loneliness, for he had not seen his adored wife since she departed for France two years ago, was deprived of his children, and surrounded by men he regarded with dislike and suspicion. Nevertheless, he had no cause to despair. The inability of his enemies to come to an agreement offered him an opportunity and reinforced his belief that he was indispensable to any settlement.

  The Scots were the first to have had enough. Despairing of achieving their ends, they came to an agreement with Parliament. In return for £400,000 – money they were due under the terms of the Solemn League – they handed Charles over and turned their faces to the north, stipulating only that no harm should come to the King’s person. Parliamentary commissioners now took charge of the King and escorted him to Holdenby House in Northamptonshire. Crowds are reported to have cheered him as he passed, further evidence to his mind that no settlement of the divided and war-ravaged state could be made without him.

  Parliament and the army were now at odds. The soldiers had many grievances. Their pay was in arrears. There were unwelcome proposals to disband some units and send others to Ireland, where the Catholic rebellion of 1641 had never been effectively suppressed. Yet there was also a difference, and point of disagreement, that ran deeper than these grievances; it was to prove an insuperable obstacle to any constitutional settlement. The Presbyterians were in the majority in Parliament; in the army the Independents. So though Parliament held what was recognised as the chief card – the person of the King – it was one that proved incapable of being a winning one. This soon became evident. Parliament proposed a compromise to the King. Let Presbyterianism be established for a trial period, followed by a general settlement agreeable to all. The idea of a trial period had been anathema to the Scots; how could you make a mere experiment of what God had ordained? The bare suggestion was anathema to the Independents of the army. Charles at least gave the matter his consideration, partly because Henrietta Maria was urging him to agree to it in letters from France. Her father, Henry of Navarre, had converted from Protestantism to Catholicism to end the religious wars that had plagued France for thirty years. Paris, he had decided, was worth a Mass. Surely Charles could be as accommodating?

  While he temporised, Cromwell acted. On the last day of May 1647 he dispatched an officer, Cornet Joyce, to Holdenby House to seize the King. When Charles asked the cornet for his warrant, Joyce pointed to the five hundred troopers drawn up in the courtyard. The King, with the calm dignity that never deserted him, smiled and said, ‘Indeed it is one that I can read without spelling. As handsome and proper a company of gentlemen as I have seen this many a day’,17 and was led off to Newmarket, where he was received with courtesy by the army commanders. Fairfax kissed his hand and allowed his (Anglican) chaplains to return. Cromwell, in benign mood, declared that the King was the most upright and conscientious man in his three kingdoms.

  Charles was now brought to Hampton Court and presented with new proposals, drawn up by Cromwell’s son-in-law, General Ireton. On the ecclesiastical side these were moderate and sensible. Indeed, they anticipated the solution to the problem of the contending parties that would eventually be reached almost half a century later. All three – Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Independents – should be allowed to go their own way, with no compulsion. The Church of England might be governed by bishops, Presbyterians might have their own church courts, and Independents should be free from the government of either. Charles was disposed to agree, if without sincere conviction. It might be the best deal obtainable. He recommended the document to Parliament
, but Parliament – or what was left of it – said no and the army was even more hostile. Ireton and Cromwell had miscalculated.

  At a general council of officers and men, one trooper, by name Sexby, expressed the soldiers’ frustration:

  We sought to satisfy all men. We have laboured to please a King, and, unless we cut our own throats, I think we shall never please him…And one thing I must say to General Cromwell and General Ireton themselves. Your credit and reputation hath been much blasted upon two accounts – your dealings with the King, your plan of settlement which was to have satisfied everybody and has satisfied nobody, and your dealings with Parliament. The authority of Parliament is a thing which most here would give their lives for, but the Parliament to which we could loyally subject ourselves has still to be called.18

  This was the language of social and political revolution. It alarmed Cromwell, who nevertheless recognised the strength of feeling and tacked towards it. It alarmed the King, who now concluded that negotiations with the army leaders were futile, since they could not deliver on any agreement acceptable to him. He was heard to say, ‘I really do believe we shall have another war.’

  Then, in November 1647, the King was warned of a plot to assassinate him. He slipped out of Hampton Court, where he was only lightly guarded, and having crossed the river at Thames Ditton rode south and reached the Isle of Wight, where he found refuge in Carisbrooke Castle. From there he could probably have escaped to France, but at some point he had given his parole, and the man accused by his enemies of having so often deceived them and gone back on an agreement would not break his word now, when he thought his honour was at stake.

  He lived comfortably enough and in relative freedom at Carisbrooke, still convinced, perhaps more than ever, that the division among his enemies meant that no settlement was possible without his approval. He wrote to the remnant of the House of Lords, justifying his flight from Hampton Court: ‘I appeal to all indifferent men to judge, if I have not just cause to free myself from the hands of those who change their principles with their condition and with whom the Levellers’ doctrine [of social, religious and political revolution] is rather countenanced than punished?’19 This was a barb aimed at Cromwell.