To Catch a King
Page 6
When Mazarin funded the Duke of Modena in a failed bid against Spain, Henrietta Maria told him that France’s support for her husband would have cost half as much, and that it would have succeeded. ‘To which,’ she recalled, ‘the cardinal made no reply, but took a hasty leave, showing by his mode of treating me, that he no longer recognized me as a queen, and the daughter of a French monarch.’11
While Henrietta Maria may have said that she considered herself just ‘a poor and wretched widow, in the flood of her miserable emotions’, she busily explored all avenues for retrieving her husband’s lost crown. These included the possibility of hiring the Duke of Lorraine’s forces, or of trusting in the goodwill of Denmark or Sweden. But in the end for various reasons these came to nothing. Ireland and Scotland were left as the most promising springboards for restoring the Stuart cause. The queen and her intimates looked at the Roman Catholicism of the Irish, and the Presbyterianism of the Scottish, and decided the sacrifice of siding with either was a price worth paying, given the magnitude of their ultimate goal.
But the past could not be wished away. Charles I’s rule of Scotland had been poorly judged. He had no first-hand experience of Scottish politics, which were enmeshed in the rigidity of the nation’s Church – the ‘Kirk’ – and in the undulating power of the various noble factions. Nor did he appreciate how the physical absence from Scotland of his father (King James returned to his homeland just once during his twenty-two years on the English throne), and then of himself, had left a power vacuum that had, in large part, been filled by the Kirk.
For its part, the Kirk had supreme confidence in its power, seeing itself as the earthly manager of God’s wishes. It viewed monarchs as royal magistrates, who served a useful purpose but were unworthy of veneration. The Kirk was happy to hold them individually to account for their human fallibility: a sinner was a sinner, no matter how garlanded his family tree.
Charles I believed with equal passion that the Church must be a spiritual reflection of the hierarchical world of which, he felt certain, he was at the social and political summit. He believed in the importance of bishops, regarding them as being, like himself, selected by God. He also viewed them as powerful allies across his kingdoms: ‘the pulpits … teach obedience [to the Crown]’, he wrote in late 1646.12
Charles attempted to impose his High Church beliefs on Scotland during the late 1630s, by insisting on the use of the Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer. His high-handedness brought about the National Covenant in 1638. This was an undertaking by the Kirk, on behalf of the Scottish nation, to adhere to the doctrines previously approved by Scotland’s Parliament, and to reject any religious interference. While the Covenant acknowledged Scotland’s obedience to the Crown, it also warned that, if pushed, the people would fight for their God against their king.
The Covenanters would, essentially, form the government of Scotland from 1638 to 1651, with the 1st Marquess of Argyll – the slight, cross-eyed, redheaded chief of Clan Campbell – as its leading aristocratic light. Charles I had tried to win over Argyll early on, inviting him to London in 1638. During that visit Argyll left the king in no doubt as to his distaste for his religious plans for Scotland. Insulted rather than enlightened, Charles hatched a secret plan for vengeance, approving an invasion of Argyll’s lands by Irish sympathisers who allied with the Campbells’ bitter enemies, the MacDonalds. These low tactics turned Argyll from a man who was merely at odds with the king’s spiritual policies into a livid Covenanter, eager to champion his nation’s religious and political freedoms under one banner.
Another leading Covenanter was the lawyer Sir Archibald Johnston, Lord Wariston, who was powered by intense religious convictions. The loss of Wariston’s first wife in 1633, when he was twenty-two, seems to have pitched him into a terrible place, from which he emerged with an endless appetite for godliness. Wariston would sleep for only three hours a night, passing his long days in bewilderingly drawn-out prayers and meditations. Dinner guests noted one evening that when he said grace, it took him an hour to reach ‘Amen’. While his regular devotions took three hours at a time, he must have surprised even himself when he realised that the prayers he had started at six o’clock one morning had only ended at eight o’clock that evening.
This fanatical piety gained respect amongst other Covenanters, and this readily crossed over into political influence. Wariston’s home, near Mercat Cross in Edinburgh, became the meeting place for the leading members of the Kirk, the night before the opening of each annual General Assembly. There they would agree in advance ‘the choosing of the Moderator, Committees, and chief points of the Assembly’.13
Wariston lent his sharp legal mind to the Kirk as it battled against Charles I’s proposed religious settlement for Scotland. Presbyterianism was, to Wariston, ‘more than all the world’, and ‘he looked on the Covenant as the setting of Christ on His throne’.14 Any who refused to have such beliefs as the cornerstone of their lives must, he argued, be disqualified from public office.
The religious collision between king and Kirk led to the Bishops’ Wars of 1639 and 1640. The Scots invaded England, taking Newcastle and threatening advances further south. The urgent need to settle the wars forced Charles to call England’s Parliament in April 1640, for the first time in eleven years. Though the ‘Short Parliament’ lasted just three weeks, a chain of events had been set in motion that eventually culminated in the English Civil War, as Members of Parliament insisted on having a long list of grievances addressed, while the king asserted his independence from the demands of his subjects. This political conflict was exacerbated by the keenly felt religious principles on both sides.
In 1643, with Royalist victories mounting and the loss of the Civil War looking possible, Parliament sought the Scots’ help. An alliance was sealed through the Solemn League and Covenant. This agreement guaranteed the preservation of Presbyterianism in Scotland, and seemed to the Scots to promise that England and Ireland would fall into line once Charles I had been defeated.
A Scottish civil war took place from 1644 to 1647, between the Covenanters and their Royalist opponents. James, 1st Marquess of Montrose, led the king’s army, a mixture of Scottish clansmen and Irish troops under Alasdair MacColla.
The charismatic Montrose won a string of remarkable victories with his small force. He repeatedly humiliated the Covenanter leader, the Marquess of Argyll, whose ruthlessness was not matched by either military ability or courage.* It was noted how reluctant Argyll was to engage with the Royalist champion. When he did, it did not go well for him.
The climax came at the battle of Inverlochy, near Ben Nevis, in February 1645. Argyll excused himself from the fight, claiming that he had a dislocated shoulder, and elected to watch proceedings from his boat in the nearby loch. From there he witnessed what was to be the bloodiest defeat his clan would ever suffer. Montrose’s significantly outnumbered men cut down 1,500 Campbells. After the battle was lost, Argyll was rowed away to safety.
Montrose’s victorious run was finally brought to an end when he was surprised in heavy mist by a large force under Lieutenant General David Leslie, at Philiphaugh in September 1645. This reverse occurred three months after the main English Royalist army had been trounced at Naseby, and added to the escalating despair in Charles I’s ranks. Montrose, refused a pardon, went into exile in Norway. The English king now seemed to have no Scottish cards left to play.
Despite this, in the spring of 1646, defeated in England and looking for a way forward, Charles I misguidedly handed himself over to the Scots. He had hoped that the allies of his English enemies would now support him, perhaps out of some underlying loyalty to his Stuart blood, but also because he had been fed inaccurate information about the Scots’ attitude to him by the French ambassador to England. The Scots, intrigued but confused by the appearance of their leading opponent in their midst, repeatedly tried to persuade Charles to take the Covenant, explaining that if he did not, they would be unable help him. But the king refused.
Henrietta Maria had agreed with her husband’s assessment. She told him, in a letter of October 1646, when the First English Civil War was lost: ‘We must endeavour to have the Scots for us, without nevertheless taking the Covenant, or doing anything which shall be dishonourable … since we have suffered so much, we must resolve to finish with honour.’
The king stuck to his views for several months, with no hint of compromise, leaving the Scots with no choice but to believe him when he said that he was not for turning. They had long made it clear that their God came before their monarch, and in early 1647 they effectively sold him to England’s Parliament, on condition that no harm would come to him – he was, after all, their king too.
There were, though, some moderate Covenanters who were open to a compromise with the king. They were party to ‘the Engagement’, an agreement that was secretly negotiated in December 1647 while Charles was held prisoner by Parliament on the Isle of Wight. Charles guaranteed these Scottish allies a confirmation of the Solemn League and Covenant in London’s Parliament, provided neither he nor any other Englishman was obliged to take the Covenant. There would also be steps towards unification of the two kingdoms, with the Scots being allowed a greater say in the government of England until that plan reached fruition. In return, Charles I was to be rescued from his island imprisonment and taken to London, where a settlement would be forced out of his enemies in Parliament. The main Scottish army would stand poised to invade if the king’s and the Engagers’ demands were rejected.
Argyll, Wariston and the other hardline Covenanters were against any such alliance, because it would compromise their rigid religious beliefs. They felt vindicated when the Engagers’ army was destroyed at the battle of Preston, in August 1648. The Kirk party was now left in control in Scotland. In January 1649 it decreed that any who had agreed to the Engagement must be barred from public office.
The news of the execution of the king at the end of that same month changed everything. It provoked horror throughout Scotland. The Kirk already felt that Parliament had failed to honour its commitment to settle Presbyterianism on England. Now it had also, contrary to its promise, beheaded the Scots’ king.
In Edinburgh on 5 February 1649, six days after Charles I’s execution, Prince Charles was proclaimed king of Scotland, England and Ireland. War with England was from that point inevitable.
While the Covenanters were quick to proclaim the exiled prince ‘King Charles II’, they made it clear that he could not actually rule until he had signed the National Covenant, with its guarantees of religious and political union. The following month a delegation of Covenanters travelled to see Charles in the Netherlands, and presented him with a bundle, carefully bound in one form, containing their demands and creeds, with the Covenant at its core.
Charles was startled by the terms offered. ‘They presented to him three propositions, demanding that he should banish Montrose & all other malignants and evil counselors from his court; that he should take the Covenant himself & establish it through all his dominions; & that he should bring but an hundred persons with him into Scotland, among which there should be none that had bore arms for his late Majesty.’17
Charles’s disappointment at the proposals was aggravated by the attitude of his hosts, the deputies of the various Dutch States, who encouraged him to agree to any terms put forward by the Scots. They knew he had nowhere else to turn, other than to Ireland, and that would involve what was, to them, a deeply troubling alliance with Roman Catholics.
But Charles still had hopes that Ireland could prove to be his saviour, because the Royalists there had allied with a Catholic confederacy to form a significant force. The resulting army, commanded by the Marquess of Ormonde, was busying itself in anticipation of an invasion by England’s New Model Army. After visiting his mother at St-Germain, Charles returned to Jersey in September 1649, ready to cross to Ireland. But by the time he landed on the island, things had changed very much for the worse. For in mid-August Cromwell had landed near Dublin.
Cromwell soon eliminated Ireland as a possible springboard for the Royalists, tearing through inadequate defences and inferior troops, leaving still unforgotten and unforgiven carnage in his wake. By early 1650, Scotland was the only possible source of military help available to Charles. In February he returned from Jersey to the Continent knowing he had a choice: either side with the Scots, or continue in impotent exile.
It was a question of what compromise he could now accept to win over the deeply distrustful Covenanters. For their part, they already knew quite a lot about him. He seemed to be very far removed from the epitome of humility and religious devotion that they might have hoped for.
* Argyll swore by a Latin saying that translated as ‘Dead men don’t bite.’
4
The Crown, Without Glory
He that sits on a dunghill today, may tomorrow sit on a throne.
The Man in the Moon, April 1650
The Marquess of Montrose, the leading Scottish Royalist, was still in exile when the news of Charles I’s beheading reached him. He, like the queen, was dumbstruck with bewilderment. When he could at last bring himself to speak, it was to swear an oath of vengeance. He vowed to see that the king’s heir was placed on his rightful throne, or to perish in the attempt: ‘As I never had passion upon Earth so strong as that to do your King father service, so it shall be my study,’ he promised the newly declared king of Scotland, ‘to show it redoubled for the recovery of you.’1 Montrose’s unquestioning loyalty would not be reciprocated by his new master.
Charles agreed to look again at the Scottish offering rejected in the Netherlands the previous year. Those speaking for the king justified an agreement with the Scots as ‘an effectual means to save Ireland, recover the King’s Right in England, and to bring the Murderers of His Majesty’s Father to condign punishment’.2
Charles encouraged Montrose to return to fight for him in the Highlands. This was in order to put pressure on the Scottish Covenanters there, while Charles negotiated with their representatives in the Netherlands, but Montrose took the royal instruction at face value. He arrived in the northern tip of Scotland with 500 German, Danish and Dutch mercenaries, and some hardy but untrained men from the Orkneys. But the clans failed to rise in his support, fearing the strength of the Covenanters while sensing the weakness of the Crown.
Before he set off for the Netherlands, Charles went to see his mother in a bid to smooth over the differences in the Royalist camp. Lord Byron, one of Charles I’s close supporters, wrote to the Marquess of Ormonde on 11 March 1650 that Henrietta Maria and Charles had just spent ten days together in Beauvais. The king was now heading for Breda, while his mother headed for Paris. ‘They met with great kindness on both sides and I hope will part so,’ wrote Byron, ‘and with a full reconcilement of those differences that formerly were betwixt them.’ Byron pointed to various figures in Charles’s court, including Sir Edward Hyde, who remained set against the treaty with the Scots: ‘[They] have by all possible means endeavoured to render the treaty we hope for, altogether fruitless to the king.’3
A few days later another Royalist in exile, Henry Seymour, reported to Ormonde that Charles was determined on action, even if the Scots proved impossible to negotiate with: ‘If the treaty [with the Scots] succeed
not his Majesty is resolved to lose no more time in idleness, and therefore must either go to you, or to my lord Montrose into Scotland. His own inclinations lean to the first. But a powerful interest [Henrietta Maria] … prefers the other, whose game lies another way.’4
The negotiations with the Scots lasted from 26 March till the end of April 1650. Charles then capitulated to all demands relating directly to Scotland, but not those that the Scots had pushed for which were connected to England or Ireland. As king of Scotland, he agreed to swear the Oath of the Covenant, and said he would commit to the supreme rule of the Presbyterian Kirk in Scotland.
One of the Scottish delegation, Alexander Jaffray, recorded in his diary the joylessness of the resulting union: ‘Being sent there by the [Scottish] Parliament, in the year 1650, for that same business, we did sinfully both entangle and engage the nation and our selves, and that poor young prince to whom we were sent; making him sign and swear a covenant, which we knew, from clear and demonstrable reasons, that he hated in his heart. Yet, finding that upon these terms only, he could be admitted to rule over us (all other means having failed him), he sinfully complied with what we most sinfully pressed upon him – where, I must confess, to my apprehension, our sin was more than his.’5
At the same time, news of the alliance gave some English Royalists hope, John Crouch printing in the periodical The Man in the Moon:
Then cheer up Cavaliers; I hear