To Catch a King

by Charles Spencer

  On the day chosen for the voyage the wind filled the Royalists’ sails, and the queen’s flotilla sped towards Brest. A rebel frigate fired its cannon at the fleeing ships, but her shots passed wide.

  It was all very reminiscent of the queen’s arrival in Yorkshire, nearly a year and a half before, in February 1643. Henrietta Maria had spent the early months of the English Civil War in Europe, pawning and selling off her jewels in order to secure soldiers, weapons and money for her husband’s cause, at a time when Royalist supplies were dangerously low. After two attempts at crossing to England, during one of which the ship carrying her horses, grooms and coaches had sunk, she managed to land at Bridlington Bay, north of Hull. Four Parliamentary vessels had tailed her, commanded by the same William Batten who would try to capture Prince Charles on the Isles of Scilly in 1646.

  The captain of one of the rebel ships had established where the queen would be staying onshore. At four o’clock the next morning, while it was still dark, he and his comrades sailed into the bay and opened fire on Henrietta Maria’s lodgings. ‘Before I could get out of bed, the [cannon]balls were whistling upon me in such style that you may easily believe I loved not such music,’ the queen gamely wrote to her husband.3 The enemy fire killed some of her attendants, one of her sergeants being cut in two while standing just twenty feet from her. Henrietta Maria only found safety after running through the snow partially dressed, and flinging herself into a ditch that was shielded by a slight rise in the ground. She risked her life again when returning under fire to recover her lapdog, Mitte. The enemy guns blazed away at her for two hours, until a Dutch admiral who had helped escort her to Bridlington insisted that Batten’s men cease fire, or suffer the consequences.

  The Bishop of Angoulême would chastise the rebels for ‘having no respect either to [the queen’s] person, or yet to her sex … nor yet regarding her long sickness, which had brought her even within two fingers of death’.4 But there was little remorse in London for an attack on a lady whose military efforts saw her celebrated by the Royalist side as the ‘she-generalissima’. Besides, because she had refused to take part in the coronation, why should this Roman Catholic Frenchwoman not be treated as just another subject?

  When Henrietta Maria made it safely to France, she did so without her infant daughter, having felt compelled to leave Princess Henrietta behind because of the baby’s delicacy. She had entrusted her to the care of a godmother, Lady Dalkeith, a noted beauty among Henrietta Maria’s courtiers. Anne Dalkeith promised that she would do all in her power to reunite mother and child at the earliest possible opportunity.

  Charles I arrived in Exeter to visit his infant daughter in the wake of his wife’s successful getaway, and soon after he had personally led the Royalists to victory at the battle of Cropredy Bridge in Oxfordshire. He was determined that the princess be received into the Church of England, and Henrietta was christened in Exeter Cathedral when five weeks old. Her father then rode off again, to lead his side to further success over the Parliamentarians in the south-west. It was the only time father and daughter would ever meet.

  Exeter fell to Parliament in April 1646, when Henrietta was twenty-two months old. The victors decided that the young princess must join her sister, Princess Elizabeth, and brother, Henry, Duke of Gloucester, as prisoners in London’s St James’s Palace. Honouring her promise to the queen, Lady Dalkeith refused to comply, instead keeping her charge with her at Oatlands Palace in Surrey.

  By the end of July 1646 Lady Dalkeith realised that Henrietta would soon be forcibly removed from her care. She therefore dressed the toddler as a ragamuffin boy, and disguised herself as a beggar woman, scrunching up a cloth under her clothes to give her the appearance of having a hunchback. Two members of the household were also included in the plan, a man who pretended to be the child’s father, and a maid, Elinor Dyke, who was there to help look after the princess throughout the escape.

  Lady Dalkeith left a letter behind at Oatlands, begging those remaining there not to let anyone raise the alarm over the princess’s absence for three days. She then hoisted Henrietta onto her shoulders and set off by foot with her small party for the port of Dover, nearly 100 miles away.

  It was an escape made somewhat harder by the young Henrietta’s insistence on telling bemused strangers that she was not, in fact, a boy but a princess. But nobody paid much attention to the scruffy child’s claims, and eventually she was brought to Dover, where she and her godmother boarded a ship for France. Arriving there, Lady Dalkeith made good her promise to the queen, returning her daughter to her in Paris, before fainting from exhaustion.

  Princess Elizabeth’s experience as royal victim was somewhat different.

  Princess Mary, Charles I and Henrietta Maria’s eldest daughter, was nine years old when she was married in London to the fourteen-year-old William, Prince of Orange, in early May 1641. He was the heir to the Dutch Republic’s senior hereditary figure, and part of the marital contract involved a strong expectation that the Netherlands would support the Stuarts in their imminent war.

  The next year the queen accompanied her daughter across the North Sea, to settle the girl into her new life, and to help find further support for her husband’s cause. They left behind Princess Elizabeth, the king and queen’s next oldest daughter. She was seven. She would never see her mother or sister again.

  Elizabeth and her younger brother, Henry, Duke of Gloucester, were taken into custody by Parliament at the outbreak of civil war, later in 1642. They were placed under the guardianship of the Earl of Pembroke that October, and were kept at St James’s Palace, where the princess had been born and christened during the peaceful years of her father’s reign.

  Princess Elizabeth had a rare intelligence, astonishing her tutors with her ability in five foreign and ancient languages before she turned eight. When the House of Commons suggested trimming her and her brother’s household, early in their gilded imprisonment, the seven-year-old wrote a protest in her own hand that was persuasive enough to convince the House of Lords to overrule the lower house, and leave things as they had been.

  1643 was largely a year of convalescence for Elizabeth, after she badly broke a leg. Daily life involved submission to the intense religious programme of her captors, with endless sermons that were meant to win over her soul, but instead numbed her mind. The princess won approval, though, for the natural modesty of her behaviour, and earned the nickname of ‘Temperance’, a Puritan virtue.

  In the summer of 1644 she and Henry were moved to Danvers House in Chelsea, and put in the care of the twice-widowed Sir John Danvers, a disgruntled sixty-year-old courtier who in his youth had been considered one of the best-looking men in England. Danvers’s extravagant love for architecture and Italianate gardens ensured the royal children were accommodated in style.

  A succession of other aristocrats sympathetic to Parliament took part in overseeing the royal children. The constant in all these changes was the Countess of Dorset, who had been Prince Charles’s governess from the age of one, and who now performed that duty with Elizabeth and Henry until her deteriorating health took its toll.

  In the spring of 1645, with the countess retired, the princess and Henry were placed in the custody of the Earl and Countess of Northumberland. They were moved to Syon House in Isleworth, Middlesex. After the surrender of the Royalist capital, Oxford, in June 1646, James, Duke of York, was brought to join them there.

  The king and queen were left miserable by their inability to rescue their three middle children, Henrietta Maria writing to Prince Charles: ‘Yet my real afflictions do not make me forget your brothers, and that unfortunate Elizabeth. Oh! If before my death, I could see her out of the hands of the traitors, I could die content. To this, at least, I will exhort you, to employ every force, to use every artifice, to withdraw so dear a part of my own heart, this innocent victim of their fury, your worthy sister, from London. Do it, I pray and conjure you, by the spirit of the king, my lord and your father.’5 But Prince Ch
arles was as powerless to help his siblings as his father had been before him.

  Charles I had made overtures to the rebels, and planned kidnap attempts, in the hope of getting Elizabeth and Henry to him at Oxford. But when, after his defeat, the king was imprisoned at Hampton Court, he delighted in travelling the six miles to the Earl of Northumberland’s private palace, to visit his three captive children there.

  At the end of January 1649, Elizabeth and Henry were taken to say a final goodbye to their father on the day before his execution. Elizabeth’s vivid account of this heartbreaking meeting demonstrates an astonishing gift for recall, particularly given the depth of emotions swirling in the fourteen-year-old’s mind at such a terrible moment.

  She wrote of how her father put eight-year-old Henry, Duke of Gloucester, on his knee, then told him, ‘“Sweetheart, now they will cut off thy father’s head.” And Gloucester looking very intently upon him, he said again, “Heed, my child, what I say: they will cut off my head and perhaps make thee a king. But mark what I say. Thou must not be a king as long as thy brothers Charles and James do live; for they will cut off your brothers’ heads when they can catch them, and cut off thy head too at the last, and therefore I charge you, do not be made a king by them.” At which my brother sighed deeply, and made answer: “I will be torn in pieces first!”’

  Elizabeth would remember her father’s words of comfort as he turned to her: ‘He desired me not to grieve for him, for he should die a martyr, and that he doubted not the Lord would settle his throne upon his son, and that we should all be happier than we could have expected to be if he had lived.’6 The next day, the king was beheaded, just as he had warned Elizabeth and Henry he would be.

  Princess Elizabeth petitioned to join her surviving family on the Continent, but three months later these hopes were dashed. Keen to get her and her brother away from London, ‘that they may not be the objects of respect, to draw the eyes and application of the people towards them’,7 Parliament ordered that Elizabeth and Henry be sent to live with the Earl and Countess of Leicester at Penshurst in Kent. Their hosts were under instruction not to acknowledge the duo’s royal blood. Their titles were not to be used, any special treatment was banned, and they were to eat with the Leicesters’ children.

  Elizabeth’s dignity in the wretched role of royal hostage impressed many. John Quarles, an exiled Royalist poet, dedicated Regale lectum miseriae, his lament for Charles I, ‘To that Patroness of Virtue and most illustrious Princess, Elizabeth, The sorrowful daughter to our late Martyr’d Sovereign, Charles, King of England’. Elizabeth was, to Quarles and many others, the embodiment of the continuing tragedy of the Stuart cause.

  On their brother Charles’s landing in Scotland in 1650, to assume the crown there, Elizabeth and her brother were removed to Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight. This was where their father had been kept secure by Parliament from November 1647 until September 1648, before his journey towards trial and execution in London. It was also as far from Scotland as could be: having the royal children cooped up there stopped them from becoming figureheads for any who might be planning a Royalist uprising in mainland England.

  Elizabeth pleaded that her health was too poor for her to be transported from Penshurst to the Isle of Wight, but Sir Anthony Mildmay, who had been part of the king’s trial, persuaded the Council of State, the nation’s chief executive body, that the security of the nation must come first. On being moved, Elizabeth’s delicate health deteriorated. She caught a cold, then consumption. That is the disease that she died of, in Carisbrooke Castle, on 8 September 1650.

  Two days later news reached the Isle of Wight that permission had finally been granted by Parliament for the princess and her younger brother to depart for the Netherlands, where they were to be handed over to the care of their older sister, Mary. Instead, Elizabeth’s next journey was to an unmarked grave, its whereabouts signalled by her initials, ‘E.S.’, on a nearby church wall.

  Henry, Duke of Gloucester, was told that his older sister had died of a broken heart, because of their brother Charles’s submission to the Scots’ extreme brand of Protestantism. The Royalists also used Elizabeth’s death for propaganda purposes, claiming that she breathed her last while her face nestled on a Bible that Charles I had given her at their final meeting.

  James, Duke of York, was taken into Parliamentary hands in June 1646, when the Royalist capital of Oxford fell to Parliament. He was forced to join his siblings, Elizabeth and Henry, in St James’s Palace, where he had been born and christened thirteen years earlier. His godparents had been the Queen of Bohemia, the Elector Palatine, and the Prince of Orange. The first two of these had lost their thrones, and the grandson of the third would one day depose James from his. But at the time of his birth the royal family of England was seemingly secure, as well as happily detached from the bloody wars that brought mayhem to swathes of Continental Europe for fifteen years before, and fifteen years after, James’s appearance in the world. Soon after his baptism James was given the title of Duke of York and Albany. Aged five, he was appointed lord high admiral of England’s expanding navy.

  By 1646, James’s life had been turned upside down. His father was militarily defeated, unsure of the future, but clinging to his belief that he was central to whatever settlement his war-ravaged kingdoms would reach. His siblings were either captive, fled overseas, or watching in despair from the foreign courts into which they had been married off.

  The three royal children confined to St James’s Palace were in the care of the 10th Earl of Northumberland, one of the grandest noblemen to stand against the Crown in the English Civil War. Northumberland was a kindly captor, whose own father had wondered what talents he might eventually reveal. The early evidence had not been promising: he had been a sickly child, with no great interest in anything.

  Northumberland had turned into a dutiful, dull, but principled man, who had been rewarded with many honours because of his high social standing, rather than through ability. Perhaps as a result, he developed a fanatical belief in the importance of hierarchy, particularly when it involved inherited rank. Sir Edward Hyde, Prince Charles’s key courtier, waspishly noted of the earl: ‘If he had thought the King as much above him as he thought himself above other considerable men, he would have been a good subject.’8

  Thanks to such an elevated sense of snobbery governing their captor, the princess and her brothers were treated with full reverence for their royal blood. Northumberland was meticulous about the details of their upbringing, and paid for part of its substantial expense out of his own pocket, since Parliament’s allowance was intentionally strict. He was aware that his prime responsibility was to keep his charges safely under Parliamentary control. This was never a side of his duties that he welcomed, but it had proved manageable when his royal prisoners had merely been two young children. The arrival of James, a youth who had been actively engaged in warfare for four years, was a different matter. Security had to be tightened. Northumberland dismissed all of James’s retinue, to the duke’s disgust and disappointment. He was particularly upset to lose the company of his favourite courtier, a dwarf.

  James, unburdened by humility at any stage of his life, was not an easy prisoner. When informed that his father the king had been taken prisoner, he was indignant, asking ‘how durst any rogues … use his father after that manner’.9 When one of those present at this outburst threatened to report his unguarded words to the Earl of Northumberland, James levelled his longbow at him, and might well have loosed off his arrow if he had not been quickly overpowered.

  King Charles had heard of plans by some in Parliament to bypass him and his eldest son, and to transfer the crown to James, who they hoped to turn into a puppet ruler. During his visits to his children, the king secretly urged James to do two things: as a guiding principle, to obey his elder brother; and, in the immediate future, to flee abroad. James agreed to his father’s instructions, but escape proved an extremely difficult proposition for an adolescent a
cting on his own. He was caught twice, at which point he was forced to give his word that he would never again try to get away.

  Princess Elizabeth encouraged her brother to continue in his attempts at freedom, telling him ‘that were she a boy she would not long remain a captive, however light or glittering might be the fetters that bound her’.10 Elizabeth has been credited with coming up with the ruse that led to James’s next escape attempt, but it was more likely the brainchild of an intriguing reprobate called Joseph Bampfield.

  Bampfield was a handsome charmer from the south-west of England who had been made colonel of a Royalist infantry regiment when only twenty years old. He had a reputation for resourcefulness, subterfuge and slipperiness, as well as a proven record in the art of escape. When he was made a prisoner of war, his enemies could only hold him briefly before he flitted to freedom. The king, who had used Bampfield’s talents as courier and spy during the Civil War, decided he was the best man to extricate his son from St James’s Palace, and then get him to safety overseas.

  The king wrote to the colonel, stressing the absolute importance to the future of the monarchy of getting the second in line to the throne out of Parliament’s control. He recognised that there would be great dangers along the way: ‘I believe it will be difficult, and if he miscarry in any attempt it will be the greatest affliction that can arrive to me,’ he conceded, ‘but I look upon James’s escape as Charles’s preservation, and nothing can content me more; therefore be careful what you do.’11