To Catch a King

by Charles Spencer

  A handful of advisers, hand-picked by the king, rode with Charles to Bristol. Prominent among them was Sir Edward Hyde, who had long been involved in the prince’s life. In early 1642 he had looked after Charles while his French mother, Queen Henrietta Maria, had sailed to the Continent to raise funds and forces for her husband. It was the start of a relationship that would run the gamut of service, trust, disappointment, triumph, rejection and disgrace.

  Twenty-one years older than the prince, Hyde was at heart a traditional patriot who believed in political stability. He had hoped for a peaceful resolution to the tensions between Crown and Parliament, believing a compromise was both possible and desirable. But there was too much fear and suspicion on both sides for reason and sense to prevail.

  As civil war became increasingly likely, Hyde’s hopes for order gradually turned him from being a critic of Charles I into a Royalist. When the king finally declared war, raising the royal standard at Nottingham in August 1642, Hyde was by his side. After that he lent his fine brain and brilliant oratory to Charles I’s cause. Hyde was made Chancellor of the Exchequer, the king justifying the promotion with a rather downbeat endorsement: ‘The truth is, I can trust nobody else.’3

  Hyde found court life complicated. It was hard for him to negotiate a landscape that was pitted with factions, and where insincerity and self-interest were the perpetual themes. Meanwhile a supreme confidence in his own views made it challenging for him to accommodate those of others when they differed.

  He brought this inflexible mindset on campaign, when he accompanied Prince Charles as he took up his command in the west. Hyde hoped to bring order to the Crown’s resistance there, but his prickly attitude, perhaps fired up by the raging gout that often dogged him, instead diminished what remained of morale in this corner of England. It was a sphere of the war that was going as poorly for the Crown as any other, not helped by the king’s leading generals in the region being at odds with one another. One, Sir Ralph Hopton, was a man of sobriety and religion, who once refused to join battle until his men had finished hearing divine service. Another, Lord Goring, was remembered even by his fellow Royalists as the epitome of the hard-drinking, roistering Cavalier. A third, Sir Richard Grenville, had been condemned as ‘traitor, rogue, villain’ by Parliament after switching allegiance to the Crown. Grenville, grandson of a great Elizabethan naval hero of the same name, had a violent temper and a reputation for ruthlessness in the field. He refused to serve under Goring or Hopton, and would be imprisoned for his disobedience.

  Prince Charles arrived in Bristol in early April to find apathy among the area’s leading Royalists, and plague erupting in the city. He decided to move thirty-two miles south-west to Bridgwater, a town whose castle was believed to be impregnable, and whose governor, Sir Edmund Wyndham, he knew. Sir Edmund’s wife, Christabella, had been Charles’s wet-nurse and assistant governess from when he was one until he turned five.

  Christabella Wyndham was noted for her great beauty, and for her bossiness. Samuel Pepys noted in his diary that she ‘governed’ Charles ‘and everything else … as [if she were] a minister of state’.4 Sir Edward Hyde dismissed her as ‘a woman of great rudeness and a country pride’.5 But she had her charms. Christabella, in her late thirties, and Charles, yet to turn fifteen, became lovers during his stay in Bridgwater Castle in 1645. Afterwards, far from exercising discretion, Christabella appalled the prince’s advisers by being shamelessly familiar with him, showering him with kisses in public. When Charles proved unable to concentrate on matters of state, thanks to Christabella’s distracting influence, his advisers moved him on from Bridgwater as quickly as they could.

  That summer Parliament’s New Model Army arrived outside Bridgwater in huge numbers, to test its impregnability. Hearing that Oliver Cromwell, the rebel force’s second-in-command, was examining the town’s defences from the far side of its imposing moat, Christabella Wyndham decided to act. As an insult to the enemy, and as a reminder of her previous role as royal wet-nurse, she is reported as having exposed one of her breasts, picked up a loaded musket, and fired. The shot missed Cromwell, but killed his sergeant-at-arms.

  The Roundheads, outnumbering the garrison by eight to one, attacked Bridgwater soon afterwards. With victory rapidly assured, the Parliamentary commander Sir Thomas Fairfax invited Sir Edmund Wyndham to recognise the hopelessness of his position and surrender. Lady Wyndham scoffed at the suggestion: ‘Tell your masters,’ she told the Parliamentary herald, ‘that the breast which gave suck to Prince Charles shall never be at their mercy. We will hold the town to the last!’ But Bridgwater was soon ablaze, strong winds whipping flames along as the enemy pushed forward, and Wyndham was forced to capitulate.

  The fall of Bridgwater was part of a summer of heavy Royalist losses. After the worst of these, at Naseby, the king wrote a letter to his eldest son from Hereford. It contained a handful of strict instructions that were to remain secret unless the prince’s closest advisers absolutely needed to know them. Until that moment, the letter’s contents must remain between father and son.

  The defeats continued into the autumn of 1645 and beyond. After the surrender of Bristol in September, the young prince was forced to move ever westwards, the demoralised Royalist forces in Devon no match for the rampant New Model Army. Bad luck played a small part in bringing forward the Crown’s inevitable downfall in the county. At the siege of Tiverton in October, a cannonball struck and severed the chain holding up the garrison’s drawbridge, sending it thudding to the ground in slack-jawed surrender. At the battle of Torrington, in February 1646, a spark found its way into a church where the king’s men had stored eighty barrels of gunpowder. The huge explosion that followed brought an end to the engagement, as well as to the lives of the Parliamentary prisoners being held in the church. Now the remaining Royalists withdrew from Devon to Cornwall, the most westerly county on the English mainland.

  Lord Colepeper, one of Charles I’s leading advisers, warned that, with nowhere else to go, the prince had now entered ‘a very Cornish mousetrap’.6 The king sent instructions for his son to be taken to France for safety. Hyde and the prince’s other advisers questioned the call, though, claiming that abandoning England for another country would become ‘an argument against his Majesty’s sincere intentions’.7 They put forward the alternatives of the Scilly Isles or Jersey, both Crown dominions.

  After continued pressure from the enemy Prince Charles was forced to abandon the English mainland. He sailed on the Phoenix to St Mary’s, the largest of the Isles of Scilly, landing there on 4 March 1646. This was only thirty miles from Cornwall, but Parliament’s dominance of the seas meant it was low on supplies, no food having reached it from England for six weeks.

  Lady Fanshawe, the heavily pregnant wife of one of Charles’s retinue, noted on arrival: ‘Meat and fuel, for half the court to serve them for a month, was not to be had in the whole island. And truly we begged our daily bread of God, for we thought every meal our last.’8 The king’s followers grew sick of the taste of salted fish, one of the islanders’ main products.

  St Mary’s was soon realised to be as militarily vulnerable as it was poorly provisioned. Despite the recent arrival of 300 Irish troops, the garrison was unable to defend the sprawling coastline. Lord Colepeper was sent to France to tell Henrietta Maria that reinforcements must be sent immediately.

  Parliament, aware of the prince’s vulnerability in his new island surroundings, tried to lure him into captivity. A silky letter was delivered by a rebel trumpeter in early April:

  Sir,

  The Lords and Commons assembled in the Parliament of England, being informed that your highness is lately removed into the Isle of Scilly, have commanded us, in their names, to invite you to come forthwith into their quarters; and to reside in such place, and with such council and attendants about you, as the two houses shall think fit to appoint.9

  Charles waited, and then composed a reply laced with equal insincerity. He thanked his enemies for their
kindness, and promised to continue to correspond with them, adding how much he looked forward to any further advice that they might choose to send him.

  It was inevitable, the prince’s advisers realised, that Parliament would now attack St Mary’s, to seize Charles and take him to England as a prisoner in all but name. Even before they had got round to sending the prince’s reply, a fleet of two dozen ships had been dispatched to the Scilly Isles under Vice-Admiral William Batten, with instructions to bring him in. With Batten went Colonel Thomas Gollop, a Royalist who had recently surrendered the island and castle of Portland to Parliament. Gollop had promised his captors that he would help deliver the prince into their clutches.

  As soon as Henrietta Maria learnt from Colepeper the danger that her son was in, she wrote to Hyde stressing her great concern at the inadequacy of the Scilly Isles as a safe haven for the talisman of the Royalist cause: ‘I need not remember [remind] you of what importance to the king, and all his party, the safety of the prince’s person is. If he should fall into the rebels’ hands, the whole would thereby become desperate.’10 Not for the last time, Charles’s freedom would be inextricably linked to any future hopes that the Royalist cause might cling to in the face of humiliating setbacks.

  It was at this point, with his liberty and life in real danger, that Charles produced the letter his father had sent to him from Hereford ten months earlier. He realised that its terms were precisely relevant to the peril he now faced. In the letter the king had insisted that Charles must never surrender on dishonourable terms, or do anything to undermine the concept of regal authority. This must be the case even if his father’s life (or his own) were at stake. Equally, the prince must not risk death, because on him rested the future hopes of the Crown. It was clear that the preservation of Charles’s life was the priority now, with the enemy closing in fast.

  When the Parliamentary fleet sent to capture the prince on St Mary’s was scattered in a timely two-day storm, Charles took the opportunity to flee to Jersey. He arrived there on 17 April 1646, as the sun was going down, the pilot of his frigate mistakenly steering a course that would normally have guaranteed shipwreck. The royal party was luckily spared, thanks to an abnormally high spring tide covering the rocks below. ‘God be praised,’ Lady Fanshawe wrote, ‘his Highness, and all of us came safe ashore through so great a danger.’11

  It was a silent entry into the harbour. There was no salute of cannon fire, from land or sea. Everyone knew that this visit, far from being part of some triumphant royal progress, was instead uncomfortable proof that the king’s cause in England was in a calamitous state. Charles was coming to Jersey as a forlorn refugee.

  But the largest of the Channel Islands was a relatively safe place for him to find himself in. Jersey had a good-sized Royalist force, and a network of established defences. The granite Mont Orgueil Castle, on the east coast, had been the site of fortifications since Roman times, and the two wards of Elizabeth Castle, which Sir Walter Raleigh had improved while Jersey’s governor at the start of the century, added solid assistance from their rocky islet. There was a further tower at the entrance to St Aubin’s harbour that had recently been freshly fortified, and half a mile off the coast of Guernsey, Castle Cornet stood in distant support.

  Sir George Carteret, from the ancient Jersey family of de Carteret, was the island’s bailiff and lieutenant-governor. Samuel Pepys described this larger-than-life character as ‘the most passionate man in the world’. It was a world that Carteret, a seafarer since boyhood, had seen plenty of. Before the Civil Wars he had served with distinction against the Barbary pirates of North Africa, rescuing Christian captives from Salé in modern-day Morocco. In 1643 Carteret captured Jersey for Charles I, ejecting the island’s Parliamentary garrison within a month of landing. Two years later, by now a Royalist vice-admiral, he was knighted. Soon after Prince Charles’s landing on Jersey Sir Edward Hyde noted that Carteret was perhaps ‘the best seaman of England’, and certainly ‘a worthy and most excellent person, of extraordinary merit towards the crown and nation of England’. Carteret was determined to keep the prince safe.

  The neighbouring Channel Island, Guernsey, had a strong Puritan element, and was keenly supportive of Parliament. With this enemy lying less than thirty miles away, Carteret insisted that all of Jersey’s regular soldiers and militia publicly profess their loyalty to the Crown. He had an open Bible placed on a drumhead, and as he watched, ten men at a time stepped forward, each placing a hand on the canvas, before being led by a priest through an oath of commitment to the king of England.

  Carteret also equipped ten frigates to prey on Parliamentary shipping. This man, who had made his name fighting against pirates, now oversaw a network of privateers, operating in the name of the king. They caused consternation to the enemy at sea, and provided prizes that were sold to fund increased defences and supplies on land.

  Anticipating that Parliament would soon send a task force to try to recapture Jersey and seize Charles, Carteret stocked and secured his strongholds. Their stores were filled with salted fish, corn, peas, biscuit and beef. His reserves were so plentiful that he filled the church at Castle Cornet with them, while stripping back its roof to form an additional artillery platform. Further cannon were placed along the island’s coast at all likely landing points.

  Sir George had two new cisterns, capable of holding more than eighty tons of water, installed in the upper ward of Elizabeth Castle. He established his headquarters there, and had the prince stay with him as his guest. Despite the military threat, and the visiting prince’s reduced circumstances, the show of royal ceremony was painstakingly maintained.

  We know, from a diarist living on the island, that at dinnertime Charles would hear grace bareheaded, before putting his hat on to eat. He would then sit alone at the head of the table, where silver cutlery had been laid out for him. A priest would stand to his right, while his lords and courtiers remained bareheaded and on their feet behind him while he ate. As he waited for his food to arrive, a kneeling pageboy would help him to wash and dry his hands.

  Dinner was offered in a succession of silver serving dishes, containing selections of meat, fish and game, which were placed before him. Food that Charles liked the look of was taken to a carvery, where a taster tested it. Sliced up, it was returned to the prince on a silver platter.

  Two pages waited, on bended knee, while he ate. One was constantly ready with a silver dish containing slices of bread. The other was the cupbearer. When Charles beckoned this servant forward, he held the goblet to his master’s lips with one hand, while with the other he positioned a second cup to catch any drops before they could splash onto the prince’s clothes. There was no stinting on pomp for the prince even when his court was minute, he was effectively in exile, and his dominion was a dot of an island.

  Charles remained under Carteret’s protection on Jersey from April till June 1646. Already tall, and with the tufts of a moustache sprouting, the prince seems to have had an affair with the lieutenant-governor’s daughter Marguerite, who was five years older than him. A key subplot of Charles’s life, his pursuit of women, continued as the First Civil War reached its conclusion, and progressed steadily from this point on.

  Henrietta Maria was insistent that her eldest son should come to her in France. There she hoped to keep him safe, and under her control, while her husband continued his increasingly hopeless resistance in England. This was very much against the wishes of Sir Edward Hyde and the other conservative advisers travelling with the prince. They wanted to keep him out of the orbit of France, because it was the historic, Roman Catholic, enemy of England. Hyde believed that what the queen was asking Charles to do breached ‘the fundamental rules of policy’.12

  Hyde had planned to be an Anglican priest, until the death of an elder brother left him as his father’s potential heir. Becoming a lawyer and a Member of Parliament instead, he remained wedded to the strictest principles of the Church of England. These made him pious in some eyes, bu
t priggish to others. In many ways he seems to have seen himself as the keeper of his young master’s conscience.

  Furious that her instructions were being ignored, Henrietta Maria sent a delegation to Jersey to insist on Charles’s removal to France. It was led by her great favourite, Henry, Lord Jermyn. The distrust of Hyde and his allies for the queen’s judgement, and for her inner circle’s trustworthiness, was intense. Hyde had developed a particular dislike of Jermyn on a number of grounds, ranging from his promotion of the plan to take the prince to live in France, to his having impregnated a beauty at court and then refusing to marry her. Jermyn was also the hereditary governor of Jersey, and there were strong suspicions that he was planning to sell the island to France.

  To the traditional supporters of the Crown, such as Hyde, Jermyn epitomised the sort of insufferable and devious character that the queen liked to surround herself with. ‘The English about Her Majesty, most favoured and consulted by her,’ recorded one observer, ‘were generally subjected to betray her counsels, and were too well known to have little regard to virtue, or to be acted by any settled principle of religion or honour. The old cavaliers did not care to trust any of them, and when they confided their sentiments, advices, & measures to Sir Edward Nicholas [a leading Royalist in exile, who was often at odds with the queen], they positively insisted that he should not communicate any of them to those confidants of Her Majesty, nor even to the Queen herself, who could conceal nothing from them, but consulted them in all affairs.’13

  Eventually Charles was persuaded to obey his mother’s wishes and go to France with Jermyn. Only one of the councillors appointed by his father accompanied him to St-Germain-en-Laye, west of Paris, where Henrietta Maria resided. The rest refused to do so. The division in the senior Royalist ranks, between the ‘Louvre group’, who supported the queen and her French leanings, and those traditionalists who saw things in a narrower and more patriotic light, could hardly have been more starkly shown.