by Allan Massie
Charles was inexperienced and beset by conflicting advice. Edward Hyde, for example, as one who knew the temper of England, was against any agreement with the Covenanters. Yet the young King was ready to negotiate with them all. This was foolish and dishonest, and he was to pay a terrible price for it. He would have done better to listen to his Aunt Elizabeth, whose judgement of Covenanters, Engagers and the schemers surrounding her nephew was that ‘they are all mad, or worse’.
Charles named Montrose captain-general of Scotland and authorised him to raise troops and make a landing in the north, even while he was negotiating with the Covenanters and preparing to submit to their demands. No doubt he hoped that Montrose would secure Scotland for him before he himself signed the detested Covenant, and regarded the negotiations with the Covenanters as an insurance policy if Montrose should fail. But he should have realised that the news of these negotiations, which obviously could not be kept secret, would render Montrose’s already difficult venture impossible. For why should men come out to fight alongside him when the King was known to be considering an agreement with the Marquis’s bitter and implacable enemies? Montrose’s chances had never been good; Charles’s trafficking with the Covenanters doomed his most loyal servant. He might as well have put the noose round Montrose’s neck with his own hands.
The Marquis sailed to Orkney, raised a sadly inadequate army, was defeated, betrayed, taken prisoner, carried to Edinburgh, and hanged. Meanwhile, before he learned of his captain-general’s fate, Charles promised to sign the Covenant as soon as he arrived in Scotland, allow the establishment of Presbyterianism in both his kingdoms, and enforce the Penal Laws against Roman Catholics. The promise made him miserable; even one of the Kirk ministers had second thoughts. Feeling sorry for ‘that poor young prince’, he thought he should not have been forced to sign the Covenant, ‘which we knew he hated in his heart’.1 It was too late, it seemed, to draw back. Charles wrote to Montrose telling him to lay down his arms, and apparently believed that he had secured from his new allies, who were really his captors, a promise of indemnity for the Marquis and other royalists. He was soon deceived. Before he sailed from Holland in the first week of June 1650, he received news of Montrose’s execution. ‘This is for Your Majesty’s service,’ he was smugly and dishonestly assured.2 The months that followed were the bitterest of Charles’s life.
John Nicoll was an Edinburgh lawyer and something of a time-server, his opinions veering in accordance with the prevailing wind. This makes him, however, a useful barometer of opinion: ‘The news of his landing coming to the knowledge of the estates of Parliament, sitting here at Edinburgh, upon the 26th of June, late at night, all signs of joy were manifest through the whole kingdom; namely, and in a special manner, in Edinburgh by setting forth of bonfires, ringing of bells, sounding of trumpets, dancing almost all that night through the streets. The poor kail-wives at the Tron sacrificed their payments and baskets and the very stools they sat upon to the fire.’3
At first all was hope. Though Charles would not be crowned for several months, a flavour of the Covenanters’ habit of mind may be caught by the account by the Reverend Robert Baillie of the eventual coronation:
This day we have done what I earnestly expected and long desired, crowned our noble King with all the solemnities at Scone, so peaceably and magnificently as if no enemy had been among us. This was of God; for it was Cromwell’s purpose, which I thought easily he might have performed, to have marred by arms that action, or at least the solemnity of it…Mr Douglas, from II Kings, XI, Joash’s coronation, had a very pertinent, wise and good sermon. The King swore the Coronation Oath; when Argyll put on the crown, Mr Robert Douglas prayed well; when the Chancellor set him in the throne, he exhorted well; when all were ended, he [Douglas] pressed sincerity and constancy in the Covenant on the King, dilating at length King James’s breach from the Covenant, pursued yet against the family, from Nehemiah v.13, God’s casting the King out of his lap, and the 34th of Jeremiah, many plagues on him if he does not keep the oaths now taken. He closed all with a prayer, and the 20th Psalm.4
Baillie, it may be remarked, was one of the more liberal ministers, and one of the few inclined to be sympathetic to the young King.
Very soon after his arrival in Scotland, Charles had a taste of the humiliations in store for him. Most of the royalist friends who had accompanied him were dismissed, Buckingham and Henry Seymour the sole exceptions. Buckingham remained characteristically light-hearted. It didn’t matter what he signed, he told Charles; he could repudiate everything once he was king in fact as well as name. Meanwhile the King was afflicted by the ministers of the Kirk, who broke in upon him at all hours to lecture him on the duties of a covenanted king and the iniquity of his parents, his grandfather (James VI) and his Catholic ancestors. He had to attend church four times on Sundays and listen to long sermons couched in the vigorous and violent language of the Old Testament. Jehovah, the Lord of Hosts, was the Covenanters’ God; they cared little for Jesus and the Gospel message of forgiveness. ‘It was,’ Charles said later, ‘a miserable life. I saw no women, and the people were so ignorant that they thought it sinful to play the violin.’5 ‘Sinful’ was indeed the ministers’ favourite word.
All this might be borne, and Charles did indeed bear it with admirable self-control, swallowing insults and sharp criticism. More worrying was the way in which the bigoted intolerance of those now around him narrowed the base of support for the war against Cromwell, which must be won if he was to be restored in both his kingdoms. It was no national movement he nominally led. The true royalists, all those who had been associated with Montrose, were anathema. Even the Engagers were spurned, and Lauderdale and the new Duke of Hamilton dismissed; they had compromised the Covenant, were lukewarm, and so the true Covenanters spewed them, like the Laodiceans of the Book of Revelation, out of their mouths. (Even so, some of the Covenanting zealots in the western counties would have nothing to do with this dubiously Covenanted king.)
The most important man in Scotland was not the King, but Argyll. Archibald Campbell, eighth Earl and first Marquis, was in his way as remarkable a man as his great antagonist Montrose. Chief of the powerful Clan Campbell, he was a Douglas on his mother’s side, and, through the Douglases, as he liked to remind people, eighth in succession from Robert the Bruce himself. His wayward father, with whom he had been at odds, had converted to Catholicism, and encumbered his estates with debt. So, as a young man, Archibald was principally concerned with getting his lands in order and repairing his financial position. Then, during the momentous General Assembly of the Kirk at Glasgow in 1638, he had experienced a religious awakening. In modern terms he was ‘born again’, from that day on committed to the Covenant and to the establishment of a theocracy, guided however by the wisdom of godly nobles, of whom he was chief. His political course was erratic, his aim constant. He had assured Cromwell he would prevent Charles from coming to Scotland, then engineered his arrival. Unprepossessing in appearance, slight, dark, thin-lipped and with a cast or squint in his left eye, Argyll was also notably intelligent and capable of exercising considerable charm. Charles soon found him the one man among the Covenanters with whom he could converse agreeably. Nevertheless, he didn’t trust him.
In August Cromwell marched north with his veteran army, accustomed to victory, to suppress the insubordinate Scots. Charles, though a proclaimed, if not yet crowned, king, was forbidden to join the army. Instead the ministers urged the necessity of purging it of ‘malignants’, for the Almighty was offended by their presence among the troops. A hundred officers and three thousand men were dismissed. Either the sacrifice was insufficient or they had misread their divinity’s mind, for the battle that followed at Dunbar was disastrous. The ministers themselves were at fault. The Scots army had been drawn up in a good position on a commanding height. Meanwhile Cromwell, outmanoeuvred, was in sore straits, supplies running out. The Scots had only to exercise patience, to adopt the traditional course of refusing battle ti
ll the English invaders were further weakened. Instead the ministers commanded that they should advance and ‘smite the Amalekites’. This was a mistake, and the battle was lost. Cromwell moved to occupy Edinburgh.
It was now proposed to raise a new army, including Engagers and any royalists who would, like the King, accept the Covenant. Argyll was alarmed. ‘You have done wickedly,’ he told the King, ‘in admitting malignants.’ ‘I know not what you mean by malignants,’ Charles replied. ‘We are all malignants to God.’6
Preparations for the coronation continued. Argyll sought to bind the King more tightly. ‘I cannot serve Your Majesty as you desire,’ he said, ‘unless you give some undeniable proof of a fixed resolution to support the Presbyterian party – which I think would best be done by marrying into some family of quality that is known to be entirely attached to your interest. This would take off the prejudice upon your mother.’7
The bride he had in mind was his own daughter, Lady Anne Campbell. Charles asked for time, and spoke of the need to get his mother’s approval. He was becoming adept in the art of prevarication. The young man who had seen off La Grande Mademoiselle was not going to be hooked by Lady Anne. He would play the bitter comedy to the end.
At last he was crowned, on New Year’s Day 1651, after a prayer that the Crown should be ‘delivered from the sins and transgressions of those preceding His Majesty King Charles II’. At the subsequent banquet, Charles expressed ‘much joy in that I am the first Covenanted King of Scotland’. He kept a straight face, and a few days later, at Stirling, consented to pray with Argyll for several hours. Both wept. Argyll was overcome by the high emotion of the night. His wife told him the King had shed only ‘crocodile tears’. ‘This night,’ she added, ‘will cost you your life.’8
At the price of humiliation, deceit and hours of boredom, Charles had achieved his first aim: to be a crowned king. He now proceeded to gather a new army, from which no faction would be excluded; and the Kirk, weakened by the disaster of Dunbar, was unable to prevent him from doing so. Eight months later, in August, he crossed the border at the head of eight thousand foot, two thousand horse and with a small train of rather outdated artillery. He looked to English royalists to rise in support, but the news that he had signed the detestable Covenant and promised to impose Presbyterianism on England – a betrayal of his martyred father – deterred them. They had not yet learned that the son was of a different temper and that his word was not to be relied on. Scotland had taught him hypocrisy; he had learned the lesson well, and never forgot it. Privately, he had already concluded that Presbyterianism was ‘no religion for a gentleman’, one indeed that he absolutely detested.
The army marched south. David Leslie, general-in-chief, grew more despondent with every mile they travelled into England. He knew too well the quality of Cromwell’s men to entertain optimism. When Charles asked him why he seemed so melancholy, he replied that, no matter how well their army looked, it would not fight. He was wrong there. When Cromwell trapped them in Worcester, and they tried to break out, many of the royalists fought with the greatest courage. Charles put himself in the vanguard – as his cousin Rupert had been accustomed to do – and had two horses killed under him. But Leslie was not quite mistaken: his own cavalry took no part in the action. Some have seen treachery in this, even evidence of an understanding with the absent Argyll. The charge is improbable. Leslie was more anxious to get his men safely back to Scotland. In any case, if he had indeed betrayed Charles, he was ill rewarded, for Cromwell clapped him into the Tower of London, where he remained till the Restoration. Charles himself did not regard Leslie as a traitor; he gave him a peerage in 1660, while Argyll was executed, ostensibly for collaborating with Cromwell.
Worcester was fought on 3 September 1651. Cromwell called it his ‘crowning mercy’; the King’s cause lay trampled in the bloodstained dust. Charles was all for fighting to the last. When Buckingham and his gentleman of the bedchamber, Henry Wilmot, who had fought on the royalist side throughout the civil war and would prove himself Charles’s most steadfast friend, urged him to escape, he cried out that he would rather be shot. But either their arguments prevailed, or they succeeded in leading him away from the lost battle.
The next six weeks were the most extraordinary, the most dangerous, the most dramatic, and yet also, in memory at least, the most exhilarating of Charles’s life. He was a fugitive, with a price of £1,000 on his head. His wanderings took him over the west Midlands and the south of England. Everywhere he found loyalists ready to risk their lives to protect him and set him on the next stage of his journey. Many were Catholics, and if, in later life, Charles was indeed drawn to Rome, it may partly have been because of the memory of how so many abused, marginalised and persecuted adherents of the proscribed faith had ventured all to see him to safety. He travelled disguised, now, his face and hands stained with walnut juice, as a woodcutter (though he could not master the local accent and was advised to keep quiet – difficult for so talkative a man); now as a groom riding behind the daughter of his supposed employer.
Everywhere there was danger. He had to trust people he had never met before, any of whom, for all he could know, might be tempted by the reward offered, or, if arrested, betray him under torture or its threat. The government proclamation was widely circulated: ‘Take notice of Charles Stuart to be a tall man above two yards high, his hair a deep brown near to black, and has been cut off. Expect him under disguise.’ That disguise was not easy. Charles, with his height – six foot two inches – his swarthy complexion, inherited from his Medici ancestors, and his grace of manner, did not look like an English countryman. He found difficulty too in walking like a peasant or woodman. He was recognised several times, once by the butler in a house where he lodged; the man, by name Pope, had been falconer to a Cavalier gentleman. A Mrs Hyde, widow to a cousin of his chancellor, knew him straight away, though she had seen him only once when he was still a boy. But nobody betrayed him. One of his early rescuers, Francis Yates, was hanged for refusing to give any information as to where the King had gone or might be found. Yates was brother-in-law to Richard Penderel, whose Catholic family ran terrible risks to save Charles. ‘If I ever come into my kingdom,’ he said to them, ‘I will remember you.’9 Charles, a man who broke promises as easily as he gave them, did not break this one. Very soon after the Restoration, the whole Penderel family were invited to Whitehall, received pensions, and heard the story of his adventures after they had parted from him.
There were several narrow escapes. He spent one day concealed in an oak tree, while Roundhead soldiers searched the woods below him. On another occasion, near Stratford-upon-Avon, while he was riding behind Jane Lane as her groom, they took a roundabout route to avoid a troop of Cromwell’s horse, only to find them already in the town. Humour was not always missing from the tales the King would tell of his escape. When his horse cast a shoe and he asked the smith ‘What news?’ the reply came: ‘None that I know of since the good news of the beating of the rogue Scots.’ ‘Are none of the English taken, that joined with them?’ Charles asked. ‘I did not hear that the rogue Charles Stuart was taken – some of the others, but not Charles Stuart.’ ‘If that rogue were taken,’ the King said, ‘he deserves to be hanged more than all the rest, for bringing in the Scots.’ ‘You speak like an honest man,’ the smith said, holding out his hand. On another occasion a drunken Cavalier squire took Charles for a Roundhead, and pressed drink on him, swearing lustily when the King was reluctant to match him glass for glass. Charles held up his hand, and imitating the characteristic Puritan whine said, ‘O, dear brother. Swear not, I beseech you.’
He journeyed now with one companion, now with another, sometimes joined by Wilmot and sometimes without him when he had gone ahead to seek information. From Worcester he had gone north by way of Kidderminster and Stourbridge, hoping and failing to cross the Severn into royalist Wales. They had then doubled back to Stratford, then south by Cirencester to near Bristol, where they hoped to find a sh
ip, then by way of Castle Cary to Bridport on the same quest. Unsuccessful there, the King was compelled to lie up for twelve days at Trent House, the property of Sir Francis Wyndham. Thence they made their way east, pausing at Stonehenge (where Charles disproved the popular notion that you could not count the stones twice and arrive at the same total) before at last arriving at Brighton, where they learned of a ship berthed at Shoreham chartered by a merchant ready to carry the King to safety. The merchant, Francis Mansell, brought the ship’s captain to the inn where they had put up. After they had eaten, the captain, Tattersall, told Mansell he had not dealt fairly with him: ‘That is the King. I know him very well.’ Mansell denied it, but Tattersall was not convinced. Again he said, to Charles when he boarded the vessel, ‘I know Your Majesty very well.’ The innkeeper had recognised him also; he proved to have been one of Charles I’s household servants. At five o’clock the following morning, 15 October, the King and Wilmot were put ashore at Fecamp on the coast of Normandy. Captain Gunter, the Sussex landowner who had secured Mansell’s services and escorted the King to the harbour, was riding home at around the same hour when he was stopped by a troop of Roundhead horse, searching for ‘a tall black man, six foot two inches high’.