Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier

by Charles Spencer

  Members of Parliament demanded a greater say in government, and a furthering of the Protestant cause at home and in Europe. Charles, though, was unresponsive. He had inherited his father’s belief in the divine right of kings, which held the monarch to be God’s anointed, with a right to rule as he saw fit. He expected his people’s representatives to respect his sovereignty, while granting him revenue when required. Four years into his reign, with three sessions already failed, Charles forewent the demanding politicians dominating Westminster and looked to fund his policies through the resurrection of ancient Crown privileges.

  The religious sensibilities of seventeenth-century Europe compounded the discord. The atrocities of the Thirty Years’ War demonstrated that the clash of different Christian sects could lead to carnage. Tales of Catholic brutalities in Germany found a ready audience in Protestant England: ‘At the taking of Magdeburg,’ it was reported in a pamphlet of 1641, ‘a Preacher of great esteem was dragged out of the Church to his own house, that he might see his wife and children ravished, his tender infants snatched from the mother’s breast, and stuck upon the top of a lance, and when his eyes and heart were glutted with so cruel a spectacle, they brought him forth bound into the street, and laid him in the midst of his own books, and setting fire thereto miserably burnt him, and thus have I given you a taste of the lamentations of Germany.’[75] The message was clear: the Papists would do the same to their religious foes in England, if they ever got the opportunity — a fear made more real by the threat of rebellion across the Irish Sea. Charles’s marriage to Henrietta Maria, Henry IV of France’s daughter, left him open to the Puritan fear that the queen’s Catholicism would taint the monarch’s soul. When the king failed to launch an armed crusade to restore Rupert’s parents to the Palatine, critics claimed this showed a shameful lack of commitment to Protestantism abroad.

  The king’s promotion of the High Churchman William Laud to the Archbishopric of Canterbury was deeply unpopular. Laud’s enemies claimed that: ‘The Archbishop hath been a notable deceiver; for whilst he did always pretend to cast out Popery and faction, he endeavoured nothing more than to bring it in, and settle it among us.’[76] Charles’s patronage of such a man seemed to confirm Puritan fears that the corrupt and ungodly, wilfully ignorant of the spiritual needs of the people, were favoured above true believers. This trend left the flock exposed to the wiles of Catholic predators, a theme John Milton angrily explored in his 1637 poem, ‘Lycidas’:

  Blind mouthes! that scarce themselves know how to hold

  A Sheep-hook, or have learn’d ought els the least

  That to the faithfull Herdmans art belongs! ...

  The hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed,

  But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,

  Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread:

  Besides what the grim Woolf with privy paw

  Daily devours apace, and nothing sed,

  But that two-handed engine at the door,

  Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.

  The Puritans believed the king to be dangerously out of kilter with the religious preferences of most of his subjects. This was, they believed, an abrogation of his duty to God. By logical extension, if Charles could not observe his obligations to the Lord, why should they offer unquestioning obedience to their monarch?

  *

  Charles was king not just of England, but also of Scotland and Ireland. It was his Scottish subjects that brought an end to his personal rule.

  Presbyterianism was a radical form of Protestantism that flourished in Scotland, particularly in the Lowlands. In 1637, ignoring his advisers north of the border, Charles insisted on imposing Laud’s English Prayer Book on the Scots. This attempt to achieve spiritual conformity in the two countries caused political as well as religious opposition. When Jenny Geddes, an Edinburgh servant girl, hurled her stool at a priest spouting Laudian offensiveness in St Giles’s Cathedral, her aggression was symbolic of a people’s fury. The Scots resented the highhandedness of a distant ruler who dared to meddle with their souls.

  Two Anglo-Scottish conflicts, the Bishops’ Wars, followed. The first, in 1639, was an inconclusive affair that did little more than reveal the feebleness of Charles’s army. The second, a year later, ended in outright humiliation for the king: the Scots defeated the English in battle, and took orderly occupation of Durham and Northumberland. Charles, unable to finance a counterforce, was obliged to summon his first Parliament for more than a decade. Despite the national emergency of having a foreign force on English soil, the Members declined to grant funds unless the king first dealt with wider issues: ‘No taxation without redress of grievances’ was their uncompromising mantra. Their three prime grievances involved the liberty of Parliament, as well as questions of religion and civil government. Charles was not prepared to bargain on any point: ‘the Short Parliament’, so long in the gestation, perished after just three weeks.

  The continuing Scottish crisis meant that Parliament had to be reconvened. November 1640 saw the start of what would come to be known as ‘the Long Parliament’. During its first six months it used the foreign incursion to win concessions from the beleaguered king. Charles was forced to approve the Triennial Act, which obliged the Crown to summon Parliament at least once every three years. Members also dismantled the raft of revenue-raising methods that Charles had relied on during his personal rule.

  Those favourites most closely associated with the Eleven Years’ Tyranny were now exposed to vengeful fury. Archbishop Laud was imprisoned in the Tower of London. The equally controversial Earl of Strafford, who had ruled Ireland for Charles, suffered a humiliating impeachment. Extreme opponents then insisted on his execution. In a moment of weakness for which he never forgave himself, Charles signed the death warrant of his most loyal servant. Strafford’s dignified acceptance of his fate added to the king’s acute sense of guilt.

  Constitutional surgery, combined with the removal of hated advisers, satisfied many in Parliament. However, the radicals, led by the Tavistock MP John Pym, wanted to push further. They sought the abolition of bishops, approval of the appointment of royal ministers, and control of the military. Charles’s supporters were shocked by this broad attack on the royal prerogative, and presented the radicals as self-serving and greedy:

  … The game they play for is so great,

  Vain is all hope them to intreat.

  The Crown is strong: the Church is rich,

  At these two things their fingers itch.[77]

  But the Crown was not strong, and its weakness became ever more obvious. When Irish Catholics rebelled in October 1641, murdering thousands of Protestants, the king prepared to summon, and appoint, the commanders of the avenging English army. However, Parliament insisted on being party to such important matters of state. Meanwhile, critics of the court composed the Grand Remonstrance, an itemised list of the king’s alleged misdemeanours. This was narrowly approved by Parliament. Pym and his acolytes were placing the king — a weak man prone to impulsiveness and stubbornness — under intense pressure. Eventually the strain told.

  On 4 January 1642, Charles attempted to arrest six especially vocal Parliamentary critics. Five were Members of the Commons, while one sat in the Lords. However, all had fled before the arrival of the king and his party, which included Rupert’s brother, Charles Louis. This clumsy lunge at the court’s enemies was the brainchild of George, Lord Digby. Digby, heir to the earldom of Bristol, would become Rupert’s greatest enemy in the Royalist camp. He had previously been a critic of the king’s advisers, while always stressing his loyalty to the Crown. Digby had argued that the monarch could only function correctly with the cooperation of Parliament: ‘The King out of Parliament hath a limited, a circumscribed Jurisdiction’, he had told the Commons, ‘But waited on by his Parliament, no Monarch of the East is so absolute in dispelling Grievances.’[78]

  Digby had argued eloquently for Strafford’s impeachment, but had been appalled when radic
al colleagues insisted on — and gained — the earl’s head. The execution caused Digby to side with the king. His charm and eloquence had quickly earned Charles’s forgiveness. The same gifts went on to win the king’s highest favour. However, the armed intrusion was early evidence of Digby’s poor judgement. The move backfired spectacularly, infuriating much of London and prompting the king to quit his capital. ‘The Five Members’ of the Commons sailed down the Thames in triumph, cheered by supporters celebrating their escape from a king whose key advisers were believed to have lured him into despotism. The failure of Digby’s ill-considered plan greatly increased the likelihood of war.

  Charles went first to Hampton Court, then to Windsor. To raise funds, he sold Windsor Castle’s silver plate. In February, afraid that fighting was about to erupt, Charles took Henrietta Maria and the young princesses to Dover. Here the royal party met Prince Rupert, who had come to thank his uncle for his part in securing his release from prison. Although Charles was delighted to see Rupert again, he spent time closeted with the prince, explaining that it would be best if he returned to the Continent: there was still a hope of peace in England, but this would be diminished if the king was seen to have enlisted his warrior nephew. Rupert understood, and accompanied the queen and her daughter Mary to Holland, where the princess was to marry the Prince of Orange. Henrietta Maria took with her some of the Crown Jewels, which she intended to sell. She would invest the proceeds in forces and weapons, to aid her beleaguered husband. Meanwhile, Charles headed for Greenwich for talks with Parliament. The dialogue was bitter and brief.

  The king now made for York, keen to put distance between himself and his antagonists, and eager to seize arms that had been stockpiled in Hull since the Bishops’ Wars: after the Tower of London, Hull was ‘the chief magazine in the kingdom for arms and ammunition’.[79] However, Sir John Hotham, recently appointed Hull’s garrison commander by Parliament, denied access to his king. Hotham flooded the surrounding fields with water from the Humber and promised to sacrifice his life, rather than surrender the town.

  More important men than Hotham now declared against the king. Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, was the 50-year-old son of the dashing Elizabethan courtier who had plunged from favouritism to armed rebellion and paid for his treachery with his life. James I had refused to visit the sins of the father on the son, and allowed Robert to revive the title and repossess the estates that his father had forfeited. Ironically, given his later clashes with Princes Rupert and Maurice, as a younger man Essex had fought against the Hasburgs for the restoration of the Palatinate.

  Essex had spent much of the 1630s quietly enjoying his wealth and estates. A brief stint commanding a coastal naval squadron was followed by service as a lieutenant general in the First Bishops’ War. The dispiriting campaign had been followed by a disappointing treaty that Charles I had insisted on brokering himself. The king then further alienated Essex, by failing to thank or reward the earl for his efforts. In January 1642, Charles tipped Essex irretrievably into the arms of Parliament. Egged on by the meddlesome Henrietta Maria, and ignoring the advice of his wisest councillors, Charles asked the earl to resign as Lord Chamberlain of the King’s Household. Six months later Essex accepted his appointment as Lord General of the Parliamentary army. The royal couple had handed their enemies a cautious but competent commander.

  *

  Both sides in the Civil War claimed to be fighting for the king: it was the definition of kingship that separated them. For most Royalists, the thought of armed conflict against God’s anointed was anathema — an aberration that challenged the cornerstone of their hierarchical beliefs. They saw matters as clearly and simply as Sir Francis Bacon, the Solicitor-General: ‘Where a man doth levy war against the King in the Realm, it is Treason. Where a man is adherent to the King’s enemies, giving them aid and comfort, it is Treason.’[80] The Prince of Wales’s chaplain echoed this sweeping condemnation of the Crown’s opponents: ‘Rebellion is a sin that strikes at God’s own self, at the face of Majesty: there is no such express image of God in the world as a King is; every Christian is the Image of Christ as a man, every Minister of the Gospel is (or ought to be) the Image of Christ as Mediator, but a King is the Image of Christ as God, and to rebel against a King is to strike at the face of Christ as God; which was more than they that crucified him durst to do.’[81]

  The Parliamentarians justified their armed opposition by making a delicate but precise distinction between the king as ruler, and the king as a man. It was quite possible, they believed, to support the king while attacking the evil advisers who were leading him astray. In July 1642, court critics in both Houses joined in a powerful declaration: ‘It cannot be unknown to the World, how powerful and active the wicked councillors about his Majesty have been, both before and since this Parliament, in seeking to destroy and extinguish the true Protestant Religion, the liberty, and Laws of the Kingdom ...’[82] This subtle separation of loyalties was a common defence throughout Europe at this time and had been employed by rebels in England since the Middle Ages, when justifying resistance to absolute rule. Some critics of the king took their strand of logic past breaking point, openly calling the Royalists ‘rebels’. Parliamentarians looked with disdain on those who offered unquestioning loyalty to the Crown: ‘We found’, a Parliamentarian wrote, when looking back on the start of the war, ‘that the common people addicted to the King’s service have come out of blind Wales, and other dark corners of the Land; but the more knowing are apt to contradict and question, and will not easily be brought to the bent.’[83]

  The political certainty of both factions was fuelled by strong spiritual allegiances. Continental Europe gave compelling lessons in the importance of binding religious prejudices tight to military ambition. Contemporaries recognised the power of the blend: watching the fighting effectiveness of Gustavus Adolphus’s troops, a British Protestant observed: ‘It is not without a mystery, I suppose, that the old Israelites had an Armoury in their Temple: they would show us, that these two cannot well be parted. And truly, methinks, that a Temple in an Army, is none of the weakest parts of fortification.’[84] As the king and Parliament prepared for war, each claimed God’s support.

  If religion had been the sole consideration, the prince could have chosen to side with the Parliamentarians, as did his elder brother Charles Louis. Rupert’s Calvinism was in tune with their Puritanism and his family had long benefited from parliamentary support for the Palatine restoration. However, his first loyalties were to the uncle he loved and to the basic principles of royal rule. Charles had been the generous patron of Rupert’s family during its protracted exile, reassuring them of his best intentions even when failing to deliver much of substance. Meanwhile, the king helped to fund his impoverished relations — Rupert received an annual royal pension of £300 — and poured love on his sister and her hapless brood, after Frederick V’s death. He wrote to Elizabeth of Bohemia in 1634:

  My Only Dear Sister,

  ... I could not let this honest servant of yours go without these lines, to assure you of the impossibility of the least diminution of my love to you; the which, as I am certain you easily believe, so I desire you to be assured, that all my actions have and shall tend to your service; and that the counsels and resolutions that come from me, is and will prove, more for your good, than those of any body else: and so I rest

  Your loving brother,

  To serve you,

  Charles R.[85]

  It was now time to repay the family debt and Rupert did not hesitate in accepting Henrietta Maria’s invitation, in August 1642, to cross once more to England, in support of King Charles. The prince made public his feeling of obligation to the king: ‘And what a gracious supporter hath he been in particular to the Queen of Bohemia (my virtuous Royal mother) and to the Prince Elector, my Royal brother, no man can be ignorant of: if therefore in common gratitude I do my utmost in defence of His Majesty, and that Cause whereof he hath hitherto been so great and happy a patron; no ingenu
ous man but must think it most reasonable.’ Rupert stressed the high regard in which Europe held his uncle, judging him ‘the most faithful and best defender of the Protestant Religion of any Christian Prince in Europe, and is so accounted by all the Princes in Christendom.’

  Rupert also countered those who painted him as a foreign mercenary, eager to ply his warrior trade whatever the cost to the native population: ‘I would to God all Englishmen were at union amongst themselves, then with what alacrity would I venture my life to serve this Kingdom against those cruel Popish Rebels in Ireland.’[86] This last point was in response to enemy claims that Rupert and his men were secretly fighting for Catholicism.

  In the same defence against his tormentors, Rupert revealed his views on the correct relationship between a monarch and his subjects. It was an uncompromising creed: ‘Suppose that he [Charles] had swayed his Sceptre with a strict hand, reining in the bridle of Authority with harsh Taxation and Tyranny (which it is too well known he did ever abhor as infections to his Sacred Person) yet I say were it so, the Subjects are not thereupon to withdraw their Obedience and Duty neither by the Laws of God nor the Laws of Man, for they are however or at leastwise should be still his Subjects ...’[87] Such sentiments were succinct, traditional, and unburdened by profound analysis.

  *

  Rupert’s first attempt to reach England failed. He set off across the North Sea on a 42-gun ship, the Lyon, with his brother Maurice. Accompanying them were Rupert’s chief engineer, Bernard de Gomme, a Walloon; and his favourite explosives’ expert, Bartholomew de la Roche, a Frenchman. Parliamentary sources reported: ‘In this ship Lyon, Prince Rupert and Prince Maurice, with divers other commanders, came in her from Holland, but after three days and three nights storm at sea, not having eaten nor drunk in all that time, these two Princes were in a sick and weak condition, and the ships set to sea again for the North of England, leaving them sick in Holland.’[88] The Prince of Orange secured another vessel for Rupert and his party. They set off again, leading a lesser vessel — a galiot — containing weaponry for the coming campaign.