The King's Revenge: Charles II and the Greatest Manhunt in British History

by Jordan, Don

  Ludlow hoped that some form of the pre-restoration Parliament might be re-established, but ‘not believing that it was yet a tyme to expect deliverance, I resolved to hasten my departure.’5 His wife and friends arranged notes of credit to be sent ahead to France, and guides and accomplices to get him out of the city and across the Channel to Dieppe.

  On the appointed night, his wife and some other relations arrived at his safe house with a coach. They crossed London Bridge and made through Southwark to the church of St George the Martyr. Here a guide was waiting with two horses to take the fugitive statesman to the coast.

  ‘I tooke my leave of my deare relations, my poore wife and another friend accompanying me,’ wrote Ludlow.6 His old life was over for good. He and his guide rode through the night along the least frequented roads to Lewes, where a merchant loyal to the parliamentary cause was expecting him. For three days he ‘lay as privately as I could’ until word came that a ship was ready at the coast. Stormy weather delayed the boat’s departure and Ludlow was almost apprehended when searches were carried out among ships waiting to leave. Fortunately, he was hidden on a craft which the agents thought not worth searching as it lay aground on a sandbank.

  The next day he got away to Dieppe and afterwards made his way to Paris, then Lyons, and ultimately towards Geneva, all the while trying to evade the royalist spies who watched out for him through Europe. Only when he arrived at Geneva – ‘Calvin’s City’ – did he feel safe. Finally, he moved to a small, out-of-the-way town on the shores of Lake Geneva.

  Years before, Charles II and Ludlow had faced one another in battle, though neither realised it at the time. It was on 23 October 1642, at the first pitched battle of the Civil War at Edgehill in Warwickshire. Twelve-year-old Charles, then Prince of Wales, was present with his father, Charles I, and his younger brother, James. Edmund Ludlow was twenty-five and a member of the life guard of the parliamentary army’s commander-in-chief, the 3rd Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux. The earl bore a famous name – that of Elizabeth I’s one-time favourite. Unlike his flamboyant and headstrong father, the 3rd Earl was a dour fellow, a cuckold and a laughing-stock at court.

  Both sides expected the action at Edgehill to be the deciding action of the war. The king, confident of victory, had brought his sons along to watch. Up to this time, the princes had lived in pampered comfort. As heir to the throne, Charles had his own court at Richmond quite separate from the establishments of his parents at Whitehall. Since the age of eight he had been in the care of a series of aristocratic lords who acted as his governors. The first had been the unutterably grand Earl of Newcastle, who had little or no interest in looking after someone else’s boy, prince or otherwise. Newcastle was a cultured man and a fine horseman whose idea of instructing the prince seems to have consisted of a series of didactic letters interspersed with short visits for a spot of archery or hunting.

  In the earliest letter that has come down to us, the prince writes to his governor, ‘I ride every day, and am ready to follow any other directions from you. Make haste to return to him that loves you.’7 According to contemporary reports, Newcastle taught the prince to ‘ride leaping horses and such as would overthrow others’.8

  On more academic matters, the earl wrote perceptive letters of advice. ‘What you read, I would have it history that so you might compare the dead with the living; for the same humours is now as was then, there is no alteration but in names.’9 The earl’s dry wit may have rubbed off on the boy, for the letter contains something of the cynicism with which the adult Charles was later to view his fellow creatures.

  In 1641, having spent £40,000 of his own money running the prince’s court, the earl decided the honour of being governor to the prince was one he could no longer shoulder. The dubious honour was handed on to the equally grand Marquis of Hertford, a bookish man with no interest in outdoor pursuits and none whatever in passing on his considerable wealth of knowledge. Like Newcastle, he carried out his task largely by remote control and lasted two years in the job. The prince thus had an easy-going upbringing, with a personal tutor and various ladies of the court for company and a few friends of his own age such as the sons of the Duke of Buckingham. It was a life with a little culture, a little academic effort, a little learning of field pursuits and a great deal of pleasure.

  Charles was growing up to be a confident if moody boy who was, like his father, an accomplished horseman. When war broke out, his education took a practical turn with first-hand observation of the many sides of humanity under stress – the weaknesses, the prevarications, the bravery, self-interest, shrewdness and more.

  For the battle at Edgehill, the young prince was given the purely honorary command of a cavalry regiment. The king’s physician, William Harvey (famous for having discovered the circulation of blood), was put in charge of young Charles and his brother. As the fight progressed, Harvey forgot about his charges, who were placed at a field medical station. When the parliamentary forces attacked the right flank of the royalist army, the Prince of Wales took his command seriously and tried to lead a charge, shouting ‘I fear them not!’ He was prevented from heading into battle by members of the royal party who grabbed his horse’s reins. When the parliamentary forces seized an advantage and pushed through the flank of the royalist army, Charles and his brother were in great danger of being captured. Once more, quick action directed the princes away from the fighting and prevented a disaster.

  As for Ludlow and his fellow life guards, they made something of a hash of their first military action. By the end of the day, thanks to tactical blunders on both sides, the battle was inconclusive. War would drag on for six more years. The heir to the throne would find himself experiencing a great deal very quickly, though after his spirited action at Edgehill, in future he was kept well away from the scene of combat.

  In early 1645, Charles I made his eldest son commander-in-chief of all royalist forces in the West Country. This meant that he would now be separated from his father. He was just turning fifteen. The campaign in the west was in turmoil but the king hoped the nominal title of command would help his son grow to manhood. This it most certainly did, in more ways than one.

  In the spring, the prince and his council moved to the royalist stronghold of Bridgwater in Somerset. Here, Charles was reunited with his former governess, the beautiful and pushy Christabella Wyndham. According to a contemporary account, Charles was ‘diverted by her folly and petulancy’. Even when the company surrounding the prince was most numerous, Christabella would ‘run the length of the room and kiss him’.10 There were rumours the beautiful ex-governess introduced the prince to the joys of sex. The fun and games did not last long; the war was running against the royal cause. On Christmas Day the prince received a letter from his father telling him to leave England and not delay one hour.11 The prince lingered until he could disobey no longer and sailed from Land’s End to the Scilly Isles on the night tide of 2 March 1646. From there, he went to Jersey and then to Paris to be reunited with his mother. He would never see his father again.

  As for Ludlow, within two years of riding out at Edgehill, he was promoted to major. By the time he was thirty-two, he had helped organise the trial of the king, signed his death warrant and become a member of the government of a new republic. Two years later he was an effective commander-in-chief in Ireland. As a firm believer in political reform and religious freedom, Ludlow’s rite-of-passage carried him through from young squire to active republican. By the age of forty-three he was a pariah and exile with a price on his head. In a period of two decades, Ludlow experienced and did more than most men could expect to see or achieve in several lifetimes – and yet at the time of his enforced flight abroad he still had thirty-two years ahead of him.

  In Switzerland, he sat down to write a history of all that had occurred between taking up arms in 1642 and the end of his religious and republican dreams. When Ludlow and his fellow life guards joined up, most thought the war would last a few months at most. Two years lat
er it was bogged down in stalemate. On the parliamentary side, the aristocratic commanders did not wish to inflict an outright victory over the king, thinking the conflict would quickly be resolved in a negotiated settlement. Essex had been appointed supreme commander by Parliament to exercise its cause on the battlefield while also preserving the life of the king.12 Ludlow watched as the war progressed and the old aristocratic generals were replaced by the ‘middling sort of men’, Cromwell’s appointees to run the New Model Army that would ultimately crush the royalist forces. He saw how the main protagonists who had entered the war on the parliamentary side were replaced by a generation of more radical figures who no longer adhered to the old system of royal favour and inherited influence.

  In the evenings by Lake Geneva, after a day’s labour at his history, Ludlow’s mind would be crowded with the ghosts of the dead and the memories of the living. Among the ghosts that visited most was that of John Cook, the brilliant young lawyer who wrote the prosecution case against Charles I. When brought to the Tower, Cook had requested that his life should be taken so that Ludlow’s should be spared. What a man that was – no truer friend or colleague could any man have had. Shortly after Ludlow had made his escape, Cook was executed for treason.

  When he did not dwell upon the terrible fate of his friend John Cook, Ludlow thought of the fate of many others, including his fellow exile, John Lisle, recently murdered in a Swiss churchyard barely twenty miles from Ludlow’s own hideaway. The old soldier was in little doubt that the same assassins plotted to come for him, too.

  And what of the ghost of Oliver Cromwell, that brilliant man who, in the eyes of Ludlow and others, betrayed the Commonwealth by becoming a king in all but name? Hated though the memory of Cromwell was, the face that leered most malevolently in Ludlow’s imagination was that of George Monck, the parliamentary general who had become a turncoat and secretly plotted to install Charles II as king.

  Fifteen years later, the republic was only a broken dream. General Monck, who had started out as an impoverished soldier for hire, was living in luxury with a dukedom and a fortune from a grateful king. Ludlow, who had lost everything, lived quietly with his wife Elizabeth, who had managed to join him in exile. She was his only comfort as he spent his days writing his memories of the great events he had taken part in. On his desk lay a brace of exquisite pistols, a present from a fellow exile who would later die for his convictions. The pistols were a talisman, a call to arms, to join a new army of revolutionaries and overthrow Charles II. But Ludlow was no longer the young firebrand who had handled weapons and directed men on the battlefield. He was nearing sixty and the fire had gone out in him.

  From his fortified house, Ludlow could see the light shift on the waters of Lake Geneva. It held no charms for him. He longed for the fields of England. He dipped his pen in ink and tried to conjure up the earthly paradise that England should have been, the paradise he thought he could help create. The light across the lake looked alien and unwelcoming. There was no beauty in this scene; God had turned against him. He entitled his work A Voyce from the Watchtower, the words taken from the book of Isaiah:

  My Lord, I stand continually upon the watchtower … And behold there cometh a chariot of men … And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen.13

  In the evening light, the mountains turned ultramarine and sapphire, their images reflected in the still waters of the lake. Ludlow wrote of his flight from England and journey to Switzerland. His description of the city of Paris said as much for his view of life as for the French capital:

  I saw the King’s stable of horses, which, though not extraordinarily furnished, gave me more pleasure than I should have received by seeing their master, who thinks fit to treat them better than his miserable people. But I loathed to see such numbers of idle drones, who in ridiculous habits, wherein they place a great part of their religion, are to be seen in every part, eating the bread of the credulous multitude, and leaving them to be distinguished from the inhabitants of other countries by thin cheeks, canvas clothing, and wooden shoes.14

  In these words the old soldier spelled out his creed: his hatred of inequality, of priests and poverty – the Puritan credo wrapped up in words that might have been written by any young Englishman on his grand tour. As for mention of his nemesis, Charles, Ludlow could not bear to write the name, preferring to use terms like ‘usurper’ and ‘enemy of the people’.

  As the shadows lengthened across the lake, Ludlow tried not to think of the shadowy figures moving across Europe and North America, searching for him and his fellow regicides – men who had dared to sit in judgment on a king.

  2

  ‘THAT MAN OF BLOOD’

  January 1647—January 1649

  On the gloomy afternoon of 30 November 1648, two hundred foot soldiers and forty cavalry disembarked on the Isle of Wight after a choppy sea crossing from the mainland. With darkness falling, they set off in driving rain for the town of Newport, lying about four miles up the River Medina. On arrival, they set up a ring of road blocks around the town, cutting it off from the outside world and sealing in its most illustrious inhabitant – Charles Stuart, king of England, Scotland and Ireland. The soldiers had orders to take the king to Hurst Castle on the mainland.

  The arrival of the detachment took everyone by surprise, including the town’s military commander, who had not been informed. One thought reverberated through the town: that the persistent rumours that the king would be assassinated were true – and that he would be killed that very night. This was not the only time such fears had circulated around the king. Fear of assassination was what had driven him to the Isle of Wight in the first place.

  When the first Civil War had ended following major parliamentary victories at Marston Moor and then at Naseby, the king decided that rather than surrender to the New Model Army, he would give himself up to the Scots. He hoped to make a deal whereby he would lead a Scottish invasion of England to regain his throne. The Scots and the king could only agree to differ and in January 1647, they handed him over to the English Parliament. Charles then lived under informal house arrest at Holmby House, an enormous Renaissance palace in Northamptonshire. He was guarded by troops answerable to the Presbyterian faction in Parliament, which was hovering on the verge of a deal with the king. In June, fearing that Parliament was about to allow the king to move back into Whitehall Palace and take up the trappings of power once more, the army decided to take the king into its own custody. A detachment of five hundred troopers was sent to Holmby House. They were led by a keen young officer, Cornet George Joyce, a political radical who had been in Cromwell’s own regiment. The source of his orders is unclear, though he claimed that his authority came from Cromwell. When the king asked for his authority, Joyce indicated the five hundred Ironsides, or cavalry, massed behind him.

  Later in the summer, the army moved the king to the palace of Hampton Court in Surrey. Here, Charles lived in opulent captivity, attended by a full retinue of servants and courtiers and surrounded by part of his famed art collection. Among his most precious masterpieces was the great series of nine paintings by Andrea Mantegna, The Triumphs of Caesar, depicting the fruits of military success. For a king who had lost control of his kingdom, the series was a mocking rebuke. In this gilded cage echoing with failure, Charles continued to reject all efforts to reach a negotiated settlement either with Parliament or the army. Cromwell and his fellow generals, Henry Ireton and Sir Thomas Fairfax, all came and left without agreement. The army had suggested a detailed settlement. Written by Ireton and another parliamentary general, John Lambert, this proposed a constitutional monarchy with reduced powers for the king. Charles rejected it outright. His modus operandi was one of non-cooperation, banking on his adversaries squabbling and burning themselves out, after which his powers would hopefully be restored.1

  In the autumn, rumours spread that various revolutionary or radical elements – army agitators and Levellers* – planned to murder the king. When the stories reached
Hampton Court, Charles took them seriously. On the evening of 11 November, his jailer, Colonel Edward Whalley (a cousin of Oliver Cromwell), went to check on his prisoner to find he had vanished, having escaped down the back stairs, leaving behind only his cloak. Under cover of darkness, Charles and several courtiers took a boat down the Thames.

  In exasperation, the influential religious radical Colonel Thomas Harrison called for the king to be prosecuted for treason, in the process famously referring to him as a ‘man of blood’.2 Two days later, Charles resurfaced on the Isle of Wight. He believed the island’s garrison commander, Colonel Robert Hammond (another of Cromwell’s cousins), was wavering in his allegiance and might come over to the royal side. Although conflicted, Hammond thought it best to take the king into captivity once more and locked him up in Carisbrooke Castle. The one positive aspect of this arrangement for Charles was that Hammond felt he had to answer to the will of Parliament, which was better disposed towards the king’s restoration without root-and-branch reform than many in the army.

  At Carisbrooke, Charles retained a retinue of servants and courtiers and was allowed regular contact with the outside world. He was, after all, still the king, even if he was not allowed to rule. He used his time and relative freedom to do clandestine deals and plot with the Scots for them to send an army to invade England. Politics and the restoration of his throne were not the only matters on his mind. He had not seen his queen, Henrietta Maria, for four years and he was lonely. For comfort, he took up with Jane Whorwood, the stepdaughter of a courtier. In code, he wrote to her suggesting how she could come to him secretly and how he wished for a ‘swiving’ (crude slang for sexual intercourse).3