The Parliamentarian commander, Colonel Nathaniel Fiennes, had received his governorship of the city through nepotism. His military experience was limited to an extremely rapid retreat from Powick Bridge, and a minor role at Edgehill. However, he was the son and heir of Lord Saye and Sele, an eminent Westminster rebel. Over-promoted though Fiennes was, he had the sense to realise that his small force faced elimination. With the city and its shipping at the mercy of the prince, he offered to discuss terms of surrender. Rupert, eager to avoid time-wasting and now confident of taking Bristol by force, limited the ceasefire to a maximum of two hours: if Fiennes failed to agree terms in that period, his garrison would be annihilated. This proved enough time to reach a peaceful conclusion: Fiennes would be allowed to lead his vanquished men unmolested out of the city to a safe, Parliamentarian destination, but stores, weapons, and armaments must be left behind for the victors.
Many Royalists had been roughly treated in similar circumstances, after the surrender of Reading. ‘Some of ours’, Baron de Gomme reported, ‘in requital, now plundered some of theirs.’[172] However, Rupert and Maurice were outraged, and Fiennes — despite facing criticism from London for losing Bristol — had the moral courage to testify on their behalf: ‘I must do this right to the Princes’, he said, ‘contrary to what I find in a printed pamphlet, that they were so far from sitting on their horses, triumphing and rejoicing at these disorders, that they did ride among the plunderers with their swords, hacking and slashing them, and that Prince Rupert did excuse it to me in a very fair way, and with expressions as if he were much troubled at it.’[173] Rupert was furious: first, as a professional soldier, he was keen to adhere to honourable conduct; secondly, as a devout Christian, he was not prepared to have his solemn word made valueless by the dregs in his ranks.
The capture of Bristol was a major boost for the king’s cause, paid for with 500 lives — most of them Cornish. One thousand of the defeated citizens joined the prince’s victorious ranks. More importantly, the capture of hundreds of barrels of gunpowder, eighty pieces of artillery and 6,000 firearms was a welcome influx for a Royalist army short of key supplies. Charles wrote from Oxford: ‘I know you do not expect compliments from me, yet I must not be so forgetful, as now that I have time, not only to congratulate with you for this last happy success of the taking of Bristol, but to acknowledge the chief thanks thereof to belong to you, which, I assure you, adds to my contentment.’[174]
There would be further triumphs, but the run of successes that culminated in Bristol was the zenith of Rupert’s Civil War career. He was recognised as the most dynamic, effective, and flamboyant general in the land, the curse of Parliament and the darling of the Royalists. He had become a man ‘whose very name was half a conquest’.[175] His military gifts were celebrated in verse:
Thread the beads
Of Caesar’s acts, great Pompey’s, and the Swede’s,
And ‘tis a bracelet fit for Rupert’s hand,
By which that vast triumvirate is spanned.[176]
The Marquess of Newcastle, commander of the king’s army in the north, wrote: ‘Your name is grown so triumphant, and the world’s expectations to look for more from you than man can do; but that is their fault, sir, and not yours. Long may you live ... a terror to your uncle’s enemies, and a preserver of his servants.’[177] The problem, unrecognised by Newcastle, was that such clear-cut distinctions no longer applied: some of the king’s most trusted servants were, in truth, becoming the prince’s bitterest enemies.
Chapter Eight - Faction Fighting
‘Persuasion avails little at Court, where always the orator convinces sooner than the argument.’
Arthur Trevor’s advice to Prince Rupert, 1644
The arrival of Henrietta Maria in the Royalist camp changed everything. The queen was a powerful character who exercised huge influence over an adoring husband. Charles was in thrall to his wife: a conventional dynastic match between England and France had quickly blossomed into deep and sincere love. The king looked to his consort for strength, encouragement, and understanding. The queen understood her role, honoured it, but — insensitive and arrogant — frequently exceeded it.
The king was shy. If his elder brother Henry had succeeded to the throne, Charles may have become a respected churchman, pursuing his modest hobbies: he enjoyed reading the Bible and Book of Common Prayer, was a keen chess player, and was entertained by the gentle skills of bowls. As a boy, his frame was so weak that his father wanted to cast his legs in irons, hoping they would be strengthened and straightened. To thicken Charles’s feeble voice, James had ordered the cutting of the membrane beneath his tongue. Only the protestations of a fiercely protective guardian saved the boy from both interventions. However, Charles’s natural awkwardness, compounded by a stammer, made it hard for him to form close relationships. When he broke through and established a bond, he tended to do so unquestioningly. To the king’s critics, his choice of trusted confidants demonstrated a dangerous lack of judgement.
Early in his reign Charles had forged a friendship with his late father’s catamite, the Duke of Buckingham, a man whose deep unpopularity culminated in an assassin’s blade. The equally controversial Earl of Strafford had filled the void, providing loyalty, focus, and drive during the difficult years of personal rule. In Scotland Charles relied on the Marquess of Hamilton, a moderate soldier and an extremely poor politician. While Buckingham and Strafford had undoubted talent, Hamilton was a mediocrity.
Thanks to his blood bond with the king and his military record on the Continent, Rupert was at the forefront of royal favour during the first year of warfare. The bumptious teenager had blossomed into ‘that brave Prince and hopeful soldier’,[178] whose devotion to the king’s cause was unashamed and infectious. Rupert and his brother Maurice were alone, among the highest-born Royalists, in coming to the war as foreign, professional soldiers, untainted by the parochial concerns of British politics. However, they were soon drawn into the machinations of a Court that lacked a strong king and was out of control.
We have seen that Rupert would take orders from nobody other than his uncle. The prince was supremely confident in his abilities and also keenly aware of his royal status. To the modern eye, Rupert’s insistence on his social superiority screams of snobbery. To contemporaries, however, it was the prince’s lack of polish that rankled with the Royalist grandees. The Earl of Clarendon wrote: ‘The reservedness of the Prince’s nature, and the little education he then had in Courts, made him unapt to make acquaintance with any of the Lords, who were thereby likewise discouraged from applying themselves to him; while some officers of the Horse were well pleased to observe that strangeness, and fomented it; believing their credit would be the greater with the Prince, and desiring that no other person should have any credit with the King.’[179]
Rupert and his faction failed to anticipate how the queen’s arrival in Oxford would impact on the prince’s relationship with the king. Henrietta Maria expected that she would now be Charles’s main counsellor on all matters relating to the war. She had long influenced him politically, but now she felt confident to advise on military matters, too: during her trek from Yorkshire, at the head of 4,000 men, she had dubbed herself the ‘She Generalissima’. Although physically courageous, she was no strategist, but Henrietta Maria was determined to oust her nephew as chief family adviser to the king.
A coterie of noblemen appreciated the significance of the queen’s arrival. They clung to her petticoats, eager for favour; they knew this was the route to power under an easily influenced monarch. George, Lord Digby, was one of the first to join the queen’s party. Digby, born in 1612, had been a keen critic of the king during the 1640 Parliament and had argued eloquently for the punishment of Strafford. However, after the shock of Strafford’s execution, Digby had entered into secret negotiations to change political sides. Promoted to the Lords, where he joined his father the Earl of Bristol, he cultivated a correspondence with Henrietta Maria that had regrettabl
e consequences: letters between them had been intercepted by Parliament before the outbreak of war, convincing Henrietta Maria’s enemies that she was a dangerous Catholic sympathiser.
Digby accompanied Rupert in his mission to shepherd the queen across the Midlands to Oxford. Digby wanted to renew links with the queen, before she was surrounded by Oxford’s competing flatterers-in-exile. Rupert disliked and distrusted Digby, and was suspicious of the speedy conversion from anti-court agitator to avowed Royalist. After the fiasco of Digby’s disobedient charge at Edgehill, he also judged him a poor soldier.
It is fascinating to see how Digby wheedled his way into royal favour. Van Dyck’s portrait of the man reveals a weak-faced arrogance; a swagger without substance; a silken fop surrounded by flattering symbols of scholarship. Rupert’s apologists have always presented Digby in a poor light: ‘Digby was the last of the King’s fatal list of evil advisers’, Warburton wrote, ‘and he united in himself almost all their gifts and errors; the grace and recklessness of Buckingham, the eloquence and imperiousness of Strafford, the love of intrigue and the military incompetence of Hamilton.’[180]
Clarendon, less one-eyed and no great admirer of Prince Rupert, was able to see what it was about Digby that entranced the king and queen: ‘The Lord Digby was a man of very extraordinary parts by Nature and Art, and had surely as good and excellent an education as any man of that age in any country: a graceful and beautiful person; of great eloquence and becomingness in his discourse (save that sometimes he seemed a little affected) and of so universal a knowledge, that he never wanted subject for a discourse.’ But there was an inherent danger in this most gifted of men: ‘He was equal to a very good part in the greatest affair, but the unfittest man alive to conduct them, having an ambition and vanity superior to all his other parts, and a confidence in himself, which sometimes intoxicated, and transported, and exposed him.’[181]
Digby possessed the timeless attributes of the consummate political operator: a silky tongue, sly self-interest, and utter ruthlessness. It was fortunate for him, yet disastrous for his master, that he deployed his talents at a time of national discord, when an irresolute king was open to any ideas that promised a restoration of his former powers. As Clarendon concluded: ‘The King himself was the unfittest person alive to be served by such a counsellor, being too easily inclined to sudden enterprises, and as easily startled when they were entered upon.’[182]
Rupert, meanwhile, was temperamentally unsuited to the conniving of court politics. ‘And it may be’, Clarendon was later to suggest, ‘a better reason cannot be assign’d for the misfortunes that hopeful young Prince (who had great parts of mind, as well as vigour of body, and an incomparable personal courage) underwent, and the kingdom thereby, than that unpolish’d roughness of his Nature; whch render’d him less patient to hear, and consequently less skilful to judge of those things, which should have guided him in the discharge of his important trust: and making an unskilful judgment of the unusefulness of the Councils, by his observation of the infirmities and weakness of some particular councellors, he grew to a full disesteem of the acts of that board.’[183]
Rupert’s style as a general revealed his character as a man: focused, straightforward, and uncompromising. The disappointments he was forced to endure in his soldiers — the lack of self-control of many, the greed and plundering of a few — were indicative of a wider malaise that reached to the very top of the Royalist hierarchy.
The prince sought an escape from such unpalatable truths by surrounding himself with like-minded acolytes, who joined him in openly despising their flawed comrades. Standing aloof, however, allowed enemies at court to continue unchecked in their quest for power. Their prime objective was to reduce Rupert’s standing in his uncle’s eyes.
The conflict between the cunning Digby and the uncomplicated but naive Rupert was symptomatic of a fault line that ran through the Royalist upper reaches. Clarendon put his finger on it when he identified ‘the spirit of craft and subtlety in some, and the unpolished integrity of others, too much despising craft or art; all contributing jointly to this mass of confusion now before us’.[184] The Royalist Bishop of Derry, preaching in early 1644, believed such rifts to be among the greatest threats to the king’s cause: ‘Where there is Faction, Envy, and Emulation amongst great Officers,’ he warned, ‘it portends a Destruction, and Dissipation.’[185]
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The first open rift between the prince’s and the queen’s parties appeared immediately after the capture of Bristol. Rupert believed that, since he had won the city, he was entitled to its governorship; this would have been normal procedure on the Continent. Charles, delighted with his nephew’s triumph, quickly approved his request.
However, Rupert’s opponents objected to a foreign prince being given control of England’s second city. They pointed out that, whatever Rupert’s military achievements during Bristol’s capture, the Marquess of Hertford was nominal commander of the Royalists in the West. Hertford was an elderly man of little energy, who was happiest studying his books. Even Clarendon, who respected the marquess as a man of principle, conceded that Hertford had: ‘contracted such a laziness of mind, that he had no delight in an open and liberal conversation’.[186] Rather than tackle this inertia, the two princes had bypassed it, taking matters into their own hands. Hertford, however, found their attitude disrespectful and hurtful. Although conscious of his considerable limitations as a soldier, he upheld an uncompromising standard of behaviour that had stood him in good stead when governor to the young Prince of Wales. He found Rupert and Maurice’s highhandedness unforgivable. Besides, Hertford wanted to reward Sir Ralph Hopton for his doughty efforts: apart from his leadership, the Somerset man had demonstrated considerable personal bravery when badly scalded in an accidental gunpowder explosion. When Hertford’s counter-recommendation arrived in Oxford, Rupert’s court opponents saw an opportunity to cut the prince down to size. The queen encouraged her husband to recognise Hertford’s seniority, elevate Hopton to the governorship, and rescind Rupert’s commission.
Charles appreciated that this was a question of such sensitivity that it demanded his personal attention. The king sent a letter to Hopton, apologising for any unintended slight Hopton may have felt, while explaining that: ‘We too much esteem our Nephew P. Rupert, to make him a means of putting any disrespect upon any Gentleman, especially one we so much esteem as you, than to give you any distaste.’[187] He then rode to Bristol, to broker a deal that would satisfy all parties. On arrival, Charles found Hopton embarrassed to be at the centre of a quarrel that had less to do with his promotion, than with the growing tensions between the Palatine princes and the queen’s court. ‘Besides that’, Clarendon noted, ‘he had always born an avow’d and declar’d reverence to the Queen of Bohemia and her children, whom he had personally and actively served in their wars, while they maintain’d any, and for whose honour and restitution he had been a zealous and known champion. And therefore he had no inclination to disoblige a hopeful prince of that house, upon whom our own hopes seem’d so much to depend.’[188]
Charles’s solution, which revealed a diplomatic touch that he seldom matched during the rest of the war, had two faces — one public, one private. It was announced that Rupert would remain as governor of Bristol, with Hopton (now created a peer) as his deputy. In secret, Rupert agreed that Hopton should govern the city as he saw fit, with his position being purely titular. Charles could see that the hostility between Hertford and his nephews was irreparable. He persuaded the marquess to ride back to Oxford with him, cleverly removing him from the battlefield by making him a senior adviser. Maurice, so recently promoted to lieutenant general, was now created General of the Western Army: a fair reflection of the younger prince’s military abilities and a move that delighted Rupert, who loved and trusted his devoted brother, who was also his greatest friend. Already, by this stage of the war, Rupert was not short of enemies.
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Despite the adoration of his men, R
upert was, by the summer of 1643, perhaps the most hated man in England. He had earned the universal fear and odium of the Parliamentary cause, their vilification coursing through the kingdom via the printed word. They painted him as sexually incontinent and accused him repeatedly of having a love affair with Mary, Duchess of Richmond, the wife of one of his closest friends.
It is hard to establish if this accusation had substance. When Daniel O’Neill, an Irish follower of the prince’s, talked to compatriots of ‘the amours of Prince Rupert and the Duchess of Richmond’,[189] he forfeited Rupert’s friendship forever. This does not mean, however, that the relationship never took place. Indeed, it is hard to think why O’Neill would have invented a tale about a man who he clearly greatly admired.
Mary Richmond was the only daughter of the murdered Duke of Buckingham. As a girl, she had briefly been married to Lord Herbert, but her husband died when she was 11. She was spirited, good-looking, and highly entertaining. Her second marriage was to the king’s cousin James, Duke of Richmond. Clarendon describes Richmond as a great favourite of Charles I’s: the duke joined the Privy Council when only 21. ‘He was a man of very good parts, and an excellent understanding’, Clarendon judged, ‘yet, which is no common infirmity, so diffident of himself, that he was sometimes led by men who judged much worse. He was of a great, and haughty spirit, and so punctual in point of honour, that he never swerved a tittle.’[190] Richmond’s three brothers all perished in the Civil War, fighting for the king.
Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier Page 13