To Catch a King

by Charles Spencer

  Hyde stayed behind in Jersey, where he began to write the early parts of The History of the Rebellion, his celebrated chronicle of the English Civil War. He knew that, for now, he had lost the battle for influence over the Prince of Wales to Henrietta Maria, and had to accept that, just like his father, young Charles was ‘irresolute’. This was Hyde’s polite term for being open to, and acting on, dangerously bad advice.

  Charles left for France in June 1646. He was included in the activities of the French court at Fontainebleau that summer, his future value to the English Royalist movement attached to his liberty, and his eligibility as a royal bachelor.

  Henrietta Maria hoped to engineer a marriage for him with her niece Anne Marie Louise of Orléans, Duchess of Montpensier. ‘Mademoiselle’, as she was known, was three years older than the prince, and not lacking in self-esteem. One of her pleasures was listing her many physical attributes in a journal. She relished the fineness of her height and figure, the glory of her auburn hair, the oval prettiness of her face, while not forgetting the finer details, from the coral bud of her lips, down to the daintiness of her feet: ‘There were not wanting those who complimented me on the beauty of my face and form’, she wrote, or ‘the fairness of my complexion, the brilliancy of my hair; no less admirable, they confessed, than all the riches which bedecked my person’.14

  To Henrietta Maria, the good looks were a bonus. It was her niece’s vast inheritance and royal blood that made her an especially desirable daughter-in-law. But Mademoiselle was more interested in the idea of marrying the Holy Roman Emperor, who had been widowed that May, than in contemplating life with the gauche English prince, whose French was poor, and whose only conversation seemed to be about horses, hunting and dogs.

  Besides, while she heard endlessly from Henrietta Maria how smitten Charles was with her, she saw little supporting evidence from her young cousin himself. Mademoiselle wrote: ‘Had he spoken for himself there is no knowing what might have been the result, but this I do know, that I was little inclined to listen to proposals in favour of a man who could not say anything for himself.’15

  The gangly Charles was noticeably ill at ease at the various balls and entertainments that Henrietta Maria forced him to attend. His clumsy attempts to woo Mademoiselle, under maternal duress, soon made him an object of pity at court. Meanwhile, the duchess found him coarse. At a dinner where ortolans were offered up as the finest of delicacies (the tiny songbirds, drowned in Armagnac, were eaten whole, brains, beak, bones and all), Charles was believed to have let himself down by instead gorging on a shoulder of mutton and a side of beef. After eating, the other guests left the royal teenagers together to flirt. But, Mademoiselle would remember with dismay, Charles did not utter a word. After a quarter of an hour of silence, she gave up.

  While Charles’s awkwardness was upending his mother’s matchmaking schemes, the queen in turn upset her son by continuing to treat him like a child. Henrietta Maria insisted that he carry on being bareheaded in her presence, an unusual protocol for a prince of his age and seniority. She also excluded him from important meetings, and insisted on receiving the pension paid to him by the French Crown, so that he was dependent on her for his allowance. Charles’s thoughts focused increasingly on getting away from France, and his mother, and doing what he could to fight for his father’s cause, as soon as the opportunity arose.

  In the spring and summer of 1648 the Second Civil War crackled into life in England and Wales, the king’s cause spearheaded by a Scottish invasion from the north on his behalf. That July Charles went from France to The Hague, on the Netherlands coast, to lead a force of English ships that had mutinied against the Commonwealth and declared for the Crown. This fleet was urgently needed to support the Royalist uprising in southern and eastern England. While it prepared for deployment Charles spent time with his younger siblings, Mary, Princess of Orange, and James, Duke of York, who had recently arrived in the Netherlands after escaping from imprisonment in London. Also on hand were two of his first cousins, Princes Rupert and Maurice of the Rhine, who had served as leading Royalist generals in the Civil War.

  It was during this month of family reunion and preparation for action at sea that Charles met, and fell for, Lucy Walter.

  Lucy was the daughter of William and Elizabeth Walter. Her father was a minor landowner from Pembrokeshire, in south-west Wales, while her mother was from a similar social background, with a small injection of aristocratic blood. Theirs was a poisonous marriage, the diarist John Evelyn referring to both parents as ‘very mean creatures’.16 Taking accusations of her husband’s abusive behaviour and abandonment to the House of Lords, Elizabeth achieved a judgement against him in 1641. This ruling was overturned six years later, in February 1647, when counter-accusations against Elizabeth, including that of infidelity, held sway. Lucy refused to obey the Lords’ ruling that she and her two brothers return to their father’s household in Wales.

  Lucy was a raven-haired, blue-eyed seventeen-year-old beauty, endowed with a shrewdness to match her striking looks. John Evelyn, who shared a carriage ride with the teenaged girl, marked her down in his diary as a ‘brown, beautiful, bold, but insipid creature’,17 while James II thought her ‘very handsome, of little wit, and some cunning’.18

  What marked Lucy out for relentless male attention, from a young age, was a pulsating sexual magnetism. So many men desired her that she was quick to appreciate her exceptional bedroom value. It was the start of a livelihood that had Evelyn looking back on her as nothing more than ‘a beautiful strumpet’.19 She would become the kept woman of important and wealthy men, including two of the sons of Robert, Earl of Leicester.

  The first of these was twenty-four-year-old Algernon Sidney, a dashing colonel in the rebel army who had been wounded in battle, and who would later declare the execution of Charles I to be ‘the justest and bravest act … that was ever done in England, or anywhere’.20 James II would maintain that Algernon had contracted for Lucy Walter’s services with forty gold coins. Others believed her favours had cost him fifty. Either way, it was a small fortune, especially given the brevity of the affair: Sidney was suddenly sent with his regiment to bolster the garrison of Dover Castle, leaving Lucy on her own.

  Lucy then moved to the Netherlands, where she was pleased, though probably not surprised, to find herself surrounded by eligible Royalist exiles, wealthy enough to compete for the pleasure of her company. She was soon taken up by Algernon’s younger brother, Colonel Robert Sidney. He was a courtier to Prince Charles, with what was to prove the apt title of Groom of the Bedchamber: Robert was Lucy’s lover when Charles appeared in the Netherlands to prepare his ships for the expected foray against Parliament.

  Some contemporaries believed that Charles was already aware of Lucy’s charms, having glimpsed them for himself when younger: ‘Her beauty was so perfect that when the King saw her in Wales, where she was, he was … charmed and ravished and enamoured,’ a French noblewoman claimed.21 However, it was Lucy who engineered the meeting with, then the seduction of, Charles in July 1648. At this time, aged eighteen, Charles was, according to an admiring Scot, ‘One of the most gentle, innocent, well-inclined Princes, so far as yet appear, that lives in the world [with] a trim person, and a manly carriage’.22 The account of Madame de Motteville, a French courtier, largely tallies with this generous description, recalling Charles at this time as ‘well-made, with a swarthy complexion agreeing with his fine black eyes, a large ugly mouth, a graceful and dignified carriage and a fine figure’. Whatever Charles’s physical characteristics, Robert Sidney realised that it would be unwise to compete with the heady attention of his royal master, and stood aside.

  During the time the prince spent in The Hague that summer, awaiting the readiness of his fleet, Lucy became pregnant with the first of what would eventually be more than a dozen of Charles’s children by various mistresses. Their son, James, was born in Rotterdam on 9 April 1649, ten weeks after the execution of his grandfather Charles I, and nine mon
ths after the start of Charles and Lucy’s liaison. Gossips pointed out that there had been no discernible gap between the conclusion of Lucy’s relationship with Robert Sidney and the beginning of her affair with the prince, and rumours attached to Lucy’s son all his life that questioned whether he was in fact of royal blood. Charles, though, always accepted that James was his son, and publicly acknowledged the fact when giving him the title of Duke of Monmouth.

  Meanwhile a shortage of funds kept Charles’s fleet at anchor, so that his efforts to help his father’s cause in the Second Civil War largely came to nothing. When he eventually sailed, his ships harassed and captured a few lesser vessels, before squaring up to the rebel navy in the Thames estuary in August 1648. In the preparations for the battle Charles impressed his men with his insistence on sharing their danger, the courtier Sir Robert Long reporting: ‘I must not forget to tell you, the Prince behaved himself with as much gallantry and courage in this business as ever you saw; for when his lords and all the seamen came to desire him to go down into the hold, under the decks, he would not hear of it, but told them his honour was more to him than his safety; and desired them not to speak of it any more.’23

  But a last-minute storm made engagement impossible. After six fruitless weeks at sea Charles returned to The Hague in September 1648, leaving the Royalist fleet under the command of Prince Rupert of the Rhine. It seems probable that he then resumed his relationship with Lucy Walter. The scandalous liaison had taken place while Sir Edward Hyde, the adviser who sought to make the prince a worthy monarch-in-waiting, was still absent in Jersey. With his moral guardian away, Charles spent time with the more dissolute members of his mother’s entourage, including Lord Wilmot.

  Hyde would characterise Henry Wilmot as ‘A man proud and ambitious, and incapable of being contented; an orderly officer in marches and governing his troops. He drank hard, and had a great power over all who did so, which was a great [many] people.’24 Wilmot gained Charles’s friendship through their shared sense of what comprised a good time. He also won the prince’s gratitude by being a willing helper in his romance with Lucy Walter: Wilmot put his carriage at her disposal so she could travel to and from the prince’s side with ease.

  Hyde was reunited with Prince Charles at The Hague in mid-September 1648, after more than two years’ separation. He found his young protégé not only expecting to become a father, but surrounded by a court in exile that was turned in on itself in despair at the recent failure of the Second Civil War. The Scots had been crushed by Cromwell at the battle of Preston, and English resistance to the New Model Army had been firmly stamped out.

  In his first speech in the prince’s council Hyde voiced his continued deep opposition to future alliances with any powers that were hostile to the Church of England. He delivered his fatalistic view: ‘It may be God hath resolved we shall perish, and then it becomes us to perish with those decent and honest circumstances that our good fame may procure a better peace to those who succeed us than we are able to procure for them, and ourselves shall be happier than any other condition could render us.’25 Continued loss of power was, for Hyde, infinitely preferable to a sacrifice of principles. Nobody worthy of the English Crown, he believed, could lower himself to a shameful alliance with the enemies of the Anglican religion. Anyone who claimed a throne in such circumstances could only keep it for the briefest of times, before inevitable overthrow. If Charles found himself without viable foreign allies, then he must await a turn in fortunes, either through his own becoming better, or those of the rebels deteriorating. Hyde hoped that the Commonwealth’s politicians and soldiers might turn against one other, and pull the republican regime apart.

  Henrietta Maria and her supporters ridiculed Hyde for choosing to wait for miracles. They preferred to actively plot a return to royal power, and were prepared to contemplate all possible means of doing so.

  In the meantime the Royalists of both factions watched in impotent disbelief and despair during January 1649 as their king was taken to London to be tried by a hastily created court, of highly questionable credentials. Prince Charles was determined to have his father released, whatever the cost. He sent a blank sheet of paper to Charles I’s captors, to which he had applied only his signature and his seal. This ‘carte blanche’ signified that there were no terms that he would reject in return for his father’s liberty.

  When he learnt that his great gesture had failed to save his father from execution, Charles was reduced to terrible, violent sobbing, while, Hyde recalled, ‘all about him were almost bereft of their understanding’.

  2

  Royal Prey

  Indeed I think it not the least of my misfortunes that, for my sake, thou hast run so much hazard; in which thou hast expressed so much love to me, that I confess it is impossible to repay, by anything I can do, let alone words.

  Letter of Charles I to Queen Henrietta Maria, 1644

  Charles I had been judged and condemned by a court composed of his enemies. Many of them were military men who had witnessed the wars for themselves, and who had been persuaded that the king was personally responsible for the bloodshed. They tried him for this treason with no time for the formalities of kingship, referring to him as ‘Charles Stuart’, and cursing him as ‘that man of blood’. For his part, the king declined to accept the court’s authority to judge him. When he refused to plead ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ for a third time, the decision was taken away from him, and he was simply declared guilty. He was sent for beheading outside his London palace of Whitehall, on an icy day at the end of January 1649.

  The rest of the royal family also suffered terribly for its association with the king’s role in the Civil Wars. Prince Charles’s wanderings, punctuated by hopefulness and humiliation, with the enemy constantly snapping at his heels, represented just one part of the trials of the Stuart dynasty at this time.

  For all that Charles I adored his wife and doted on his children, once he had declared war on Parliament he exposed them to ever-increasing levels of personal danger. It was the taking of sides in a ferocious conflict, caused by profound political, religious and social tensions, that soon removed the princes and princesses from the supposed sanctuary of royal status. The pampered children of the years of peace became the pawns of war.

  The king and his eldest son, Charles, Prince of Wales, put on armour, and led armies against the Crown’s foes. To those who fought against the Royalists, they had chosen to step down from their majestic pedestals, and elected to become merely key enemy personnel. Their death on the battlefield could therefore be contemplated as distinctly possible. It was a short step from that thought to one of actively seeking out royal prey.

  Meanwhile the Presbyterians and Puritans who dominated the House of Commons had long viewed the French-born queen, Henrietta Maria, with suspicion and distrust. She made no attempt to conceal her zealous Roman Catholicism, and it was clear to all that she exercised considerable control over the king. Yet it was not until 1641, the year before war broke out, that she had first felt in personal danger. Accusations that she was the king’s chief evil counsellor, and talk of her possibly being impeached as a consequence, persuaded her to put in place contingency plans for escape.

  On Sunday, 16 June 1644 Queen Henrietta Maria gave birth to Princess Henrietta, her eighth and last child, in Bedford House, the finest private residence in Exeter. Henrietta would be one of six of her and King Charles I’s children to survive infancy.

  The queen had long suffered from ill health. A month earlier her doctor, Theodore de Mayerne, had judged her so fragile that he concluded ‘her days would not be many’.1 Henrietta Maria was left in such a weak state by the delivery that she felt obliged to request a favour of the enemy commander, the Earl of Essex, asking him to guarantee her safe passage to Bath, where she wished to take to the restorative mineral-rich waters. She immediately followed this with a second request, to be allowed to continue on to Bristol after her stay in Bath. Bristol was the most important English
port after London, and was held by the Royalists.

  Essex could only suspect that, once she was well enough, the queen planned to set sail from Bristol and disappear overseas. He therefore replied that he would be delighted to give her safe conduct, but only if she would go to London – he pointed out that that was, after all, where the best medical advice in the country lay, and added that it would be his honour and pleasure to attend her on her journey to the capital. As for Bath or Bristol, he expressed his regret that he was unable to allow her to travel to either city without Parliament’s direction.

  Despite the exquisite sheen of the earl’s manners, the subtext was clear: Parliament would never contemplate the queen’s move to Bath or Bristol, while Essex would do what it took to bring her into his custody, where she could be detained to the advantage of the Crown’s enemies, as a highly valuable hostage to be used against the king.

  Henrietta Maria was aware that many in Parliament hated her. They correctly guessed that the French princess had only been allowed to marry their Protestant king because Pope Urban VIII wanted to ‘procure the reign of popery’ in England.2 Her attachment to her faith had been so unswerving that she had refused to take part in her and her husband’s coronation, because it would involve being crowned by a Protestant prelate. Since then she had established ornate Roman Catholic chapels in royal palaces throughout the kingdom, and had formed ties with all manner of apparently dangerous foreigners, including papal envoys. Given this bitter history between queen and Parliament, as soon as Essex refused her request to travel to Bath, Henrietta Maria contemplated her options.

  Four weeks later, feeling her health had slightly improved, the queen sailed out of Falmouth harbour for her native France. She was carried on a Flemish man-of-war that had, along with the ten vessels accompanying it, been ‘fresh tallow’d and train’d’ in order to give her the best chance of outrunning Parliament’s roving patrols. She hoped to slip through their blockade on a favourable wind, but a barge with sixteen oarsmen accompanied her ship, ready to spirit her away to safety if the weather calmed.