To Catch a King

by Charles Spencer

  Bampfield made contact with James through one of the palace’s attendants, who engineered a secret meeting between the young duke and his would-be rescuer. By way of credentials Bampfield showed James the letter of instruction he had received from the king. He told James that the escape plan would involve the wearing of a disguise, and measured the boy’s height and waist with a ribbon.

  James was thrilled at the prospect of possible freedom, and readily obeyed the colonel’s directions. These involved his joining his little sister and brother in games of hide and seek in St James’s Palace each evening after dinner throughout the following week. There needed to be carved out from James’s day an apparently innocent sliver where his absence did not immediately raise suspicion. The children’s games provided that cover.

  The household, including its guards, quickly became used to James’s skill at hiding. Consequently, when on the night of 20 April 1648 the duke could not readily be found, nobody thought much of it. It was assumed that he would be discovered somewhere nearby soon enough, as he had been on the previous six evenings.

  But this time, James had made a break for it. After tricking a gardener into lending him a key, he had dined with his younger sister and his little brother before challenging them to their nightly entertainment. Now it was that he went down a staircase to a gate that gave access to the surrounding parkland, triple-locking it behind him with the key he had sweet-talked the trusting gardener into giving him.

  Bampfield was waiting on the other side. He wrapped a cloak around the boy, and put a wig on his head, before whisking him away in a coach that carried them to a waiting boat. This was rowed towards a house near Tower Bridge where the colonel’s lover, Anne Murray, waited.

  To keep herself occupied that evening, and assuming that a boy of James’s age might well be hungry, Anne busied herself preparing food for the duke. She had a lady’s tunic with her for James to wear as a disguise. ‘It was,’ she would recall, ‘a mixed mohair of a light hair colour and black, and the under-petticoat was scarlet.’12 Anne’s tailor had been mystified by the surprisingly unfeminine measurements she had submitted to him, saying that this unseen client had to be the shortest woman with the largest waist that he could remember cutting for.

  As time passed, Anne waited with mounting anxiety for the colonel and the duke. Bampfield had warned her that if he and James had not arrived at the steps of London Bridge by ten o’clock, she must assume that the risky plan had failed. If that were the case, she would be in mortal danger of discovery, and must flee for her life.

  When she heard church bells chime ten, and the lookout said there was still no sign of the boat, he asked her what they should do. Anne said she must stay, just in case her lover and the boy were running late.

  She later admitted that she had in fact assumed the pair had been captured, and that she would soon pay the price for being part of a failed treasonous conspiracy. ‘And,’ she recalled, ‘while I was fortifying myself against what might arrive to me, I heard a great noise of many as I thought coming up the stairs, which I expected to be soldiers to take me, but it was a pleasing disappointment, for the first that came in was the Duke, who with much joy I took in my arms and gave God thanks for his safe arrival. His Highness called, “Quickly, quickly – dress me!”; and, putting on his clothes, I dressed him in the women’s habit that was prepared, which fitted his Highness very well.’ Indeed, she could not help noticing that he ‘was very pretty in it’.13

  James ate the food Anne had prepared for him. She then gave him a treat for his journey: a Wood Street cake – a fruit cake that was as light in yeast as it was thick with icing. It was a speciality of a neighbourhood of the City of London, and she knew it to be one of the duke’s favourites.

  James and Bampfield then ran back to the barge, where their oarsmen took advantage of the favourable wind and tide to head towards a waiting Dutch ship, twenty miles away at Gravesend. Before they could reach it, though, the wind turned, convincing Bampfield that they would be blown back to the shore. James urged: ‘Do any thing with me rather than let me go back again!’ At last the wind came right once more, and they made it to their ship.

  Back at St James’s Palace, relaxation at James’s assumed skill at hide and seek had first turned to mild concern, before spiralling into panic. The Earl of Northumberland was informed that the duke appeared to be missing, and immediately ordered a meticulous search of the entire palace. When it was found that James was clearly absent, he sent a messenger to William Lenthall, the Speaker of the House of Commons, saying that he feared James had escaped, but that he had no idea how.

  Northumberland, his many former offices including a stint as lord admiral of England, insisted that the Speaker immediately send a dispatch to the great seaports of Kent and Sussex, barring any vessel from leaving for abroad until it had been thoroughly searched.

  There was chaos in the speaker’s office as the clerks bickered over how best to carry out Northumberland’s order. They struggled to construct the correct words to help block the flight of the most eminent prisoner in England. Serjeant at Arms Norfoulke, a witness to this clerical pandemonium, later reported that a dozen orders were written out, then rejected, before all were happy with the wording of the final version. By the time the dispatch finally reached its recipients, the duke was gone.

  He landed at Middleburg, in the Dutch province of Zeeland, on 22 April 1648, before being carried to The Hague on his brother-in-law’s yacht. James had been forced to leave two siblings behind in captivity, but he had gained a third. He was now warmly welcomed into his bravely-won freedom by his older sister Mary, Princess of Orange. At their reunion she threw royal stiffness to the wind, running towards her brother and hugging him tight.

  When Prince Charles heard of his brother’s daring rescue, he was overjoyed. He of course had no idea that it would one day fall to him to be the next member of his family to attempt a getaway from England. While his mother’s escape had been relatively simple, and those of his brother and sister had been both bold and clever, his would be of an entirely different order, for it would be set against almost impossible odds, and the knowledge that capture would result not in imprisonment, but death.

  3

  A Question of Conscience

  Continue the same endeavours for Prince Charles as thou hast done for me, and [do] not … whine for my misfortunes in a retired way, but, like thy father’s daughter, vigorously assist Prince Charles to regain his own.

  Charles I to Henrietta Maria, 22 April 1646

  The regicides – those few dozen men who had found brief common cause in January 1649 to rush through the judgement and execution of the king – found, after the royal beheading, that they had little to unite them. They immediately broke up into ill-defined factions, sharply divided over the best direction for the newborn republic.

  On one side was Oliver Cromwell, the God-fearing East Anglian gentleman who had risen to become second-in-command of the New Model Army. The might of this Parliamentary military machine had been chiselled from the professionalism and religious conviction of its Puritan veterans. Cromwell, having delivered up great victories, had the army’s overriding support.

  He and his tight knot of political supporters, many of whom were his relatives, hoped that Charles I’s execution would be the final act of the English Civil War, bringing to an end a conflict that had claimed the life of one in twenty Englishmen. Cromwell looked now for conciliation and reform, while remaining ready to stamp out further Royalist resistance with his troops, should it surface.

  John Bradshaw was prominent among those regicides with a very different view of how things must now be. A lawyer plucked from obscurity to become lord president of the impromptu court that had sent the king to his doom, Bradshaw saw the execution of a tyrannical ruler as a thrilling act that should be celebrated, and then built upon. While Cromwell hoped the king’s death would demark a full stop, Bradshaw saw it as a mere comma in the unfurling script of England’s el
ectrifying new story.

  Those who had overseen Charles I’s execution dominated the Council of State, the executive body established the month after the king’s death. A replacement for the Privy Council, it was responsible for domestic and foreign policy, as well as the security of England and Wales. Eighteen of its forty-one councillors had been among those to sign the royal death warrant.

  All of the councillors and the other regicides could agree on one thing: that the fledgling republic needed to be sustained. But there were others who felt that a unique opportunity for constitutional change had been lamentably mismanaged. They had suffered in the fight against the king, and now expected their aspirations to be honoured. Among them was a radical group known to its detractors as ‘the Levellers’.

  The Levellers were still working on their manifesto, which they had begun two years earlier, at the time of the king’s death. An Agreement of the People was intended to be the blueprint for a written constitution, stating the inalienable rights of all Englishmen, and detailing the contract between them and their elected representatives. It demanded equality for all before the law, and that the vote be open to all men over twenty-one, other than Royalists, servants and beggars. England’s New Chaines Discovered, published immediately after the establishment of the Council of State, was a protest that these hopes had been ignored. The Levellers accused the new government of seizing power from the people. Their leaders were arrested for their effrontery.

  But this movement, based on principle, remained dangerous in the months following the execution of the king, and it had support in the army, which had suffered so greatly in the cause against the Crown. Richard Lockier, one of the Levellers’ leaders, was captured, then executed by firing squad outside St Paul’s Cathedral in late April 1649. This stoked up a wider military mutiny. There were many in the army who had been inspired by Leveller ideas, and who were also furious at arrears in their pay, while being frightened at the prospect of being sent to fight in the graveyard of disease-ridden, boggy Ireland. Cromwell defeated the main mutineer force, in a night attack at Burford in Oxfordshire. While 300 of them were pardoned, three of the ringleaders were shot in the village’s churchyard. Even though Cromwell could declare the Leveller threat in the army over by the end of May 1649, there was still much for the new regime to settle before it could consider itself established. A myriad of hopes had been raised by the toppling of the Crown, and not all of them could be satisfied.

  Six weeks after Charles I’s beheading, kingship was abolished, Parliament declaring: ‘The office of a King in a nation, and to have power thereof in a single person, was unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety, and public interest of the people, and therefore ought to be abolished.’1

  In a further dramatic break with the past, the Royal Seal in the House of Commons was smashed into pieces by a hammer-wielding labourer. Its replacement contained the text: ‘In the First Year of Freedom, by God’s Blessing Restored.’ Ancient liberties, notionally lost under centuries of kingship, were being celebrated and reinstated under the new regime: the Commonwealth.

  John Bradshaw’s allies included two men who were responsible for the twin struts of the new regime’s printed propaganda. The great poet and man of letters John Milton, who now championed the regicides in written duels with their European detractors, was given the title of Secretary for Foreign Tongues.

  Meanwhile Milton’s friend Marchamont Nedham – a journalist and pamphleteer who had supported Parliament, then sided with the king, before getting firmly behind the new republic – oversaw the influential weekly newsbook Mercurius Politicus from June 1650. He took on this important journalistic role at a key moment in the Commonwealth’s campaign to make the republic more devout. The Puritan leadership felt this was required in order to secure God’s continuing favour. In May 1650 Parliament passed an Act condemning those guilty of incest, adultery and fornication. The incestuous and adulterous could expect the death penalty, ‘without clergy’ being in attendance at their end. Fornicators received a three-month prison sentence for their first offence. A few months later, the blasphemous joined the swelling ranks of outlaws.

  Mercurius Politicus produced journalism of the highest class, engaging correspondents throughout Europe, while having access to the republic’s all-seeing spy network. Nedham was given a salary of £100 a year, ‘whereby he may subsist while endeavouring to serve the Commonwealth’.2

  The rise of printed domestic news and propaganda was a pronounced feature of the English Civil War. The first such publication, The Heads of Severall Proceedings in this Present Parliament, appeared in November 1641, nine months before hostilities began. There was then an explosion of the printed word, with approximately 300 different partisan newsbooks competing for attention during the 1640s and 1650s. Although many faded away after a few issues, several of them appeared with regularity, the most popular having a run of up to 1,500 copies at a time.3

  Milton and Nedham were both relentless promoters of the kingless state. One of their constant refrains was the merciless mockery of any who proposed that Charles, Prince of Wales – who was sometimes referred to as ‘the Young Pretender’ – should regain his family’s throne. These attacks showed what a terrifying prospect it was for those who had killed the father, should the son return to hold them to account.

  The question for those Royalists who had been so decisively defeated in two civil wars, between the summers of 1642 and 1648, was who would provide the manpower to make it possible to challenge Parliament’s army, now their own forces had been crushed. The answer to this was most vigorously addressed by the widowed queen.

  When Henrietta Maria was informed of her husband’s execution, she stood mute and motionless for an age, seized by a shock that she seems not to have come fully to terms with during the remaining twenty years of her life. In the aftermath of Charles I’s death she retreated briefly to a Carmelite nunnery. On re-emerging she wore mourning clothes, and would do so for the rest of her days.

  Henrietta Maria wrote of her wish to ‘retire with only two maids, my secretary, and confessor, to private life, to finish my days with the least possible disturbance, disentangled from the world’.4 She could not forget, though, the hopes and wishes that her husband had shared with her during the darkest periods of the later years of his rule.

  In July 1646 he had written to her: ‘And though the worst should come, yet I conjure thee to turn thy grief into a just revenge upon my enemies, and the repossessing of Prince Charles into his inheritances.’5 Two months earlier he had sent a letter to his eldest son that had equal clarity: ‘I command you to obey [your mother] in everything, except religion, concerning which I am confident she will not trouble you.’6

  Charles was convinced that his wife could be a great support to their eldest son, for he knew how heavily he himself had leant on her throughout the Civil Wars. When the king’s baggage train was captured at the battle of Naseby in June 1645, the correspondence unearthed there revealed the full extent of Henrietta Maria’s hold over her husband. One letter particularly appalled Parliament. In it, Charles had written: ‘I give thee power to promise in my name, to whom thou thinkest most fit, that I will take away all the penal laws against the Roman Catholics in England, as soon as God shall enable me to do it.’7 One of the main charges levelled against the king by his Puritan and Presbyterian enemies had been that he was secretly sympathetic to Roman Catholicism, thanks to his wife’s corrosive influence. This letter conclusively proved the point.

  Henrietta Maria knew her husband to be weak, and easily swayed by his advisers. She wrote despairingly of how he was apt ‘to take sudden counsels’,8 many of which, she felt, ran contrary to the Crown’s and her family’s interests.

  This situation had become much more difficult for Henrietta Maria to control after she and Charles parted at Abingdon, for what would turn out to be the last time, on 17 April 1644. She had hugged her husband’s knees, begging him to let her stay by his side. Bu
t he was adamant that she must go abroad, to secure him aid. Her usefulness in that purpose overrode his thoughts for himself, because, he said, her remaining with him would be his ‘greatest consolation’. ‘And I found myself ten leagues distant from him,’ the queen would recall, ‘before I became conscious that I had left him, so much did grief overcome my natural senses’.9 The great sadness of parting aside, Henrietta Maria was also troubled at leaving her husband far removed from her controlling hand.

  The queen was proud to be a child of one of France’s great kings, Henri IV, who had been stabbed to death by an assassin when she was less than six months old. She hoped that those who governed the land of her birth would respect her position as one of its princesses, and choose to help her family in its quest for restoration to its royal powers. But the French were embroiled in European conflict, principally the Franco–Spanish War, which had started in 1635 and would rumble on till 1659. They also had to contend with the ‘Fronde’, their own civil war, which erupted in 1648, largely brought about by the huge cost of funding France’s wars.

  Meanwhile Henrietta Maria’s brother, Louis XIII, died in 1643. She had hoped he would help her and her husband to overpower the English rebels. Now, she found, France’s leading figures were mostly delighted to stand and watch the spectacle across the Channel as their centuries-old enemy tore itself in two.

  Henrietta Maria had written to her only surviving brother, the Duke of Orléans, at the beginning of 1646: ‘I expect nothing but entire ruin, unless France assists us.’10 But Orléans was unable to help. He was frequently at odds with Anne of Austria, his young nephew Louis XIV’s mother and regent, and with the chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin. Meanwhile Anne and Mazarin’s foreign policy was focused on the fight with Spain, with England’s discord merely a delicious side dish.

  Despite this, Mazarin, the consummate diplomat, seemed to promise much to Henrietta Maria. ‘Had I believed Cardinal Mazarin,’ she wrote, ‘I should have thought he was putting to sea with the most powerful army that had ever left France, for the help of our lost kingdoms.’ After being repeatedly let down by him, she concluded bitterly ‘that all that he said was only a cheat to quiet me’. But she never gave up hope that France could be persuaded to do the right thing for her and for her family.