The duke and duchess liked Rupert enormously, and were constant in their support of their friend while he was away fighting, sticking up for him against his court enemies. Parliament assumed the worst about the three-way friendship and delighted in portraying it as yet another disgraceful Royalist scandal. In one pamphlet, The Ladies Parliament, the wives of Charles’s grandees were presented as debating in a whore house as to which of the Cavaliers they should keep nearby, to fulfil their desires: ‘The rattle-headed being assembled at Kate’s in Covent Garden, and having spent some time in choosing their speaker, (it having been objected against the Lady Duchess, that she had used beating up of quarters, and other sports, too frequently with Prince Rupert,) they at last resolved upon the Lady Isabella Thynne, hoping thereby that the acts might have the great influence upon the King’s majesty.’ In this fanciful setting, Rupert was eventually chosen as the lead stallion, after ‘the Duchess of Richmond assured them, that none was to be compared to Prince Rupert, against whom nothing could be urged, but that his labour was not always crowned with the desired and wished for success’.[191]
There seems little doubt that there was a very strong bond between Rupert and Mary — she sent him messages of support throughout the Civil War — but there is no evidence that their loving friendship progressed beyond the platonic. The duke’s closeness to the prince never wavered, which strongly suggests that at no stage did he suspect that he was being cuckolded by his friend. When, in 1655, Richmond died, there was an expectation that his widow would quickly marry Rupert, but this never materialized.
The prince needed the Richmonds’ unstinting support, as jealousy and resentment underpinned a burgeoning opposition to him within senior Royalist ranks. Although presented by enemies and posterity as tough and focused, we know from the effort Rupert put into refuting the more outrageous rebel claims that their libels cut him deep. It is also clear that his appetite for fighting for a cause that contained so many men — and one woman — whom he found increasingly unsympathetic, was taking its toll.
Rupert could accept the term ‘cavalier’ for himself, because his analytical mind separated the intended slur of the pamphleteers from his more rigid definition of the word: one who rode loyally in defence of the king. But even if he could claim such a chivalrous role for himself, for his brother, and for their closest military confidants, there was no denying that the more derogatory implications of the name described other prominent Royalists. Many of these, like Digby, and the roistering Wilmot and Goring, found favour at court. This was a situation that appalled and demoralised Rupert, sapping the inspiration and dampening the flair that were his greatest strengths as a military commander. It was difficult to give everything, to risk all, in a cause that was increasingly identified with individuals and creeds that the uncompromising prince loathed.
Rupert was soon openly at loggerheads with the queen. Three Parliamentarian peers, the earls of Bedford, Clare, and Holland, came to Oxford to seek the king’s pardon, while offering to join his cause. The king was torn. He wanted their services, but he did not wish to show weakness to prominent enemies: Bedford had commanded the rebel cavalry at Edgehill, and Holland had been one of the Parliamentary commissioners whose demands the king had found so unpalatable earlier in the year. To Henrietta Maria, there could be no forgiveness for such traitors. She told Charles to reject the aristocrats’ request and send them back to the enemy ranks.
Rupert took a more pragmatic approach: the Royalists had been successful, but he knew this could not continue indefinitely, because the rebels were well provided for, while his own men were short of supplies, especially gunpowder. To Rupert it was a case of simple arithmetic: every man that could be brought across from the enemy ranks counted twice over — depriving the rebels of a soldier while correspondingly boosting the king’s army by one. Showing mercy to the three grandees, Rupert argued, might persuade others to change sides. Charles saw the strength of this argument and upset Henrietta Maria by agreeing to pardon the three earls. In winning this round, and getting his way in the Hopton affair, Rupert had used up much of his credit with his uncle: it was hard for Charles constantly to ignore his wife’s advice.
Strategic differences between the king and the prince became increasingly evident. Gloucester was now, after Bristol’s fall, the most important Parliamentarian stronghold in the west. Charles moved his army to Gloucester’s walls and told Rupert to demand its surrender from the rebel commander, Colonel Edward Massey. Massey refused, declaring that he ‘held the city for the King and Parliament, and would not surrender it to any foreign prince’.[192] Rupert was among the generals and nobles who urged Charles to march on, towards London, rather than expend valuable campaign time in besieging the city. But the king was not to be rushed. With memories of the terrible casualties suffered at Bristol fresh in his mind, he refused to storm the city. Sure that the generous terms he had offered would persuade the people of Gloucester to surrender, Charles settled down for what he expected to be a brief siege.
The king’s optimism proved ill founded. Although his men, urged on by Rupert and Maurice, tried to bring the city to its knees, Gloucester held out. During one foray, Prince Rupert was nearly killed by a rebel grenade. Parliamentarians would look back on the determined defence of the city’s garrison as a pivotal moment in the war:
... As Gloucester stood against the numerous Powers
Of the besiegers, who with Thunder-showers
Charg’d her old ribs, but vanisht like a storm
With their own loss, and did no more perform
Than squibs cast in the air, which throw about
Some furious sparks, and so in smoke go out.
‘Twas not her Trenches which their force withstood,
Nor river purpled with Malignant blood,
Canon, nor bulwarks rais’d with Martial art
That did secure her, but Great Massey’s Heart;
That was the Fort no Engine could beat down,
Nor mine blow up, more strong than was the Town.[193]
Eventually, with the defenders down to their last three barrels of gunpowder, the Royalist army learnt that the Earl of Essex was approaching with a relief force of 14,000 men. The order was given to retreat to Oxford, leading to widespread dissatisfaction in the king’s upper ranks: ‘I am afraid our setting down before Gloucester has hindered us from making an end of the war this year,’ wrote the young Earl of Sunderland, ‘which nothing could keep us from doing if we had a month’s more time which we lost there, for we never were in a more prosperous condition.’ Sunderland, in his letter to his wife, also commented on the worrying division in the king’s counsel: ‘How infinitely more happy I should esteem myself quietly to enjoy your company ... than to be troubled with the noises, and engaged in the factions of the Court, which I shall ever endeavour to avoid.’[194] The failure of the siege of Gloucester, and the delay that it had entailed, impacted immediately on the king’s cause. The insidious workings of the factions were of longer-term significance.
While Essex disgorged arms and men into the relieved city, the Royalists belatedly marched towards London. However, Charles still failed to understand the need for speed and assumed that a day’s head start was enough to leave Essex in his wake. But the earl, whose first year in command had been dogged by accusations of indecision, now showed real purpose. He cut across country, recapturing Rupert’s prize of Cirencester on the way. When scouts reported that Essex’s army was bearing towards Hungerford, the prince appreciated that the race for the capital was on.
Eager to regain the initiative, the prince sent for permission to attack the enemy with his cavalry as they crossed open ground. When the king’s council of war refused his request, disbelieving the intelligence reports, Rupert set off in person with three retainers to press for immediate action. He eventually tracked the king down to a farmhouse and walked in to an astonishing scene. In this time of high urgency and drama, Charles was quietly playing cards with Lord Percy, his ar
tillery general, under the lazy gaze of the Earl of Forth, the Royalist commander. Rupert blew into the room like a tornado, demanding that the army march that night. His physical presence managed to convince his uncle that Essex must be stopped from reaching London first.
Rupert’s attacks over the next two days slowed the Parliamentarian progress. His cavalry and dragoons won the race with the enemy to secure the main bridge crossing the Kennet, at Newbury. The infantry and artillery then arrived, digging in to the southwest of the town, ready to meet Essex’s army. However, the king’s generals failed to utilise the advantage gained by the prince’s dynamism: they left the higher ground before them unoccupied and failed to reconnoitre the likely battleground.
Rupert advocated a defensive battle. He pointed out that Essex had no option but to reach London, and this imperative would leave the rebels vulnerable when they crossed open ground. The prince had seen the patchwork of enclosures between the two armies and knew his cavalry would not be able to attack effectively over such terrain. But Charles’s other advisers, including the meddlesome Henrietta Maria, persuaded the king to go on the offensive, negating the effectiveness of the horsemen who had brought him triumph over the preceding year. They marched into the teeth of Essex’s infantry, which was superior in number and experience.
The Royalists fought bravely, but Rupert’s advice had been correct: the lay of the land favoured the enemy. The king’s forces were caught in withering artillery and musket fire, and their losses were terrible. Eleven of the twelve ensigns of Lieutenant Colonel Ned Villiers’s foot regiment were wounded. ‘Horse! Horse!’, the infantry cried, desperate for mounted support, but this was not the ground for sweeping charges. Rupert lost 300 of his cavalry brigade, and thirty of the sixty men in his personal troop, as he repeatedly attacked the London Trained Bands. He could not break them, though he did see off the Parliamentary squadrons guarding their flanks. The prince was lucky to escape with his life: Sir Philip Stapleton, a Parliamentarian, had ridden up to him unhindered and discharged his pistol at Rupert. The bullet missed. In the confusion, Stapleton escaped.
Militarily, the First Battle of Newbury had been a stalemate. Lack of ammunition stopped the Royalists from pushing for victory: they could only afford to fire one round against every three of Parliament’s. By the evening, the Royalists were reduced to just ten barrels of gunpowder, prompting Lord Percy to urge tactical retreat at the council of war. Rupert, aware of the imperative of blocking Essex’s route to London at any cost, advised the king to hold his position. But Charles ordered his troops to return towards Oxford, allowing Rupert only to attack Essex’s men as they passed near Aldermaston. This was a sop to a nephew whose influence was on the decline. In retrospect, Newbury was a battle that gave Parliament morale and momentum after the repeated pummelling they had received — mainly from Rupert — earlier in the year. Rebel commanders believed that: ‘The Earl of Essex did break both the head and the heart of the King’s army at Newbury.’[195]
The casualties were high among the Royalist nobility. In The Chequers coaching-house, in neighbouring Speenhamland, the bodies of the Earl of Sunderland, who had written of his disillusionment with faction fighting, and the Earl of Carnarvon, who had fought with distinction at Roundway Down, were laid out. The most notable loss, however, was of the respected, moderate Viscount Falkland, one of Charles’s most influential advisers.
Some suspected that Falkland had thrown his life away, rather than continue to participate in a conflict that he abhorred: Clarendon, in a lyrical eulogy for his fallen friend, recalled that ‘after the King’s return from Brentford, and the furious resolution of the two houses not to admit any treaty for peace, those indispositions, which had before touched him, grew into a perfect habit of uncheerfulness; and he ... became, on a sudden, less communicable; and thence, very sad, pale, and exceedingly affected with the spleen’.[196] He had seemed upbeat before the battle, confident and laughing as he took a lead position in Sir John Byron’s cavalry.
He rode close to hedges that were lined with enemy musketeers, however, and ‘more gallantly than advisedly spurred his horse through the gap, where he and his horse were immediately shot’.[197] When he failed to return from the charge, Falkland’s friends hoped he had been taken prisoner, but his body was recovered the following morning.
Falkland was much mourned by his colleagues, but the real loss was his moderating influence on the more extreme Royalists. Although he and Rupert had had their differences before Edgehill, there was little further trouble between them. Both men, from different perspectives, shared a deep dislike of the increasing influence of the queen’s self-interested warmongers: Falkland because he longed for peace; Rupert because he distrusted their conniving. The prince believed their scheming undermined the prospects for the war, while also eroding his independent effectiveness as a general.
The real disaster for Rupert was the identity of the man chosen to replace the dead Falkland as one of the king’s two secretaries of state: George Digby. The prince’s bête noire was now, officially, one of his uncle’s inner coterie of confidants, on hand at all times to drip poison into the King’s ear. Digby, Clarendon wrote with regret, was ‘one of the chief promoters of the war: he advised the King worse, and acted for him more zealously, than any of his councillors’.[198]
With Digby in the ascendant, and Henrietta Maria’s other favourites aware that hostility to the prince constituted a quick route to queenly favour, Rupert busied himself away from the snake pit of Oxford. The prince was able to distance himself from the disappointments of Gloucester and Newbury, his reputation unaffected by setbacks not of his own making. He now took command of Royalist forces in the eastern counties of England. The principal action of the war had taken place in the Midlands, the Cotswolds, the southwest, Yorkshire, and in the Thames Valley. Rupert, the supreme cavalryman, was looking for an exposed flank to exploit, and the bold plan he sent to the council of war involved a thrust into East Anglia. Parliament had quickly dominated this region at the outset of war, and it had since provided valuable recruits and supplies. However, localised uprisings showed that the eastern counties contained an untapped source of Royalist sympathisers. These were urgently needed to refresh ranks depleted by death, injury, and desertion.
But Rupert was overruled: the majority of Charles’s advisers thought the project too risky. Certainly, it was a high stakes’ strategy. However, by passing up his chance to make inroads into the east, the Royalists limited themselves to recruiting in areas of traditional support — Cornwall, Wales, and the northwest — which were already almost sucked dry. More worryingly, by gleaning Royalist sympathisers from these areas, the king was leaving them vulnerable to future enemy occupation.
*
Rupert took pride in his brother’s successes in the southwest, although these were not without controversy: Maurice had brought the siege of Barnstaple to a successful conclusion by promising, ‘on my Honour in the word of a Prince’, that the inhabitants would be well treated. But his men had let him down with ugly plundering.
Maurice fell seriously ill, probably from typhus, while besieging Dartmouth. Rupert was in agonies at the prospect of losing the man who was closest to him in an increasingly hostile world. The prince sent the most eminent physician of the day, Sir William Harvey — the man who discovered that blood circulated through the body — to assist the three doctors already attending Maurice. Their combined efforts managed to save him.
Less happy was the news of another Palatine brother. Charles Louis appeared in London late in 1643, declaring his support for the Parliamentarians, who reinstated the generous pension that his uncle had previously granted him. There had been rumblings from the Continent, seized upon by enemy propagandists, that Rupert’s family were furious and embarrassed by his fighting Parliament. Sir Thomas Roe had written to Elizabeth of Bohemia in September 1642, explaining how the Prince’s Royalism was damaging the Palatine cause in England. A document, The Best News That Ever was
Printed, was gleefully circulated, allegedly the words of Rupert’s mother and elder brother, but in fact a fake: ‘We do, in the presence of Almighty God, and of all the whole world, and in the sight of all good men, in no manner approve, give consent, or any way countenance the unjust and unruly actions of my son Prince Rupert, now in England; and so do I, the same with the Queen, my dear mother, by the same vow disrelish and hate all those outrages and cruelties of my brother, Prince Rupert. And it grieves us at our very souls for the inhuman cruelties we hear he commits; whose passion we cannot confine, and whose hot spirit we cannot calm…’[199]
The composers of this fancy hoped to raise rebel morale by claiming that Rupert would soon be forced to return to the Continent. They also reflected a genuine belief that the prince, in striking out at Parliament, was betraying a loyal and generous ally that had repeatedly helped his family in its quest to reclaim the Palatine. ‘Call Prince Rupert to the bar’, the pamphleteers thundered, ‘thou hast been a right-flying dragon prince, and hast flew strangely up and down in this island, and hast stung to death those that formerly preserved thy life. O, ungrateful viper ... Speedy vengeance on thy cursed head!’[200] ‘The people’s goodness alone made them give to the Queen of Bohemia so many great and free contributions’, wrote another, ‘and now you have not only taken away their wills but their means of ever doing the like; having brought us to so wretched a condition that we shall never hereafter have leisure to pity her, but rather condemn her as the mother of our calamity.’[201]
Before the war, Charles Louis had accompanied the king on his bungled attempt to arrest the Five Members of the House of Commons. However, unlike Rupert and the other Palatine siblings, the young Elector believed the duty of retrieving his father’s squandered lands overrode his obligations as a dutiful nephew. In fairness, Charles I had made negligible efforts on his sister’s behalf, while Parliament regarded Elizabeth’s cause as a Protestant crusade. The majority of MPs agreed with Calybute Downing, Pastor of Hackney, who wrote to them in 1641 that: ‘The present Prince Charles [Louis] bath a true title of right, to require the restitution, the investiture, and actual possession of all those Dominions and Dignities Electoral, in an individual, sole, and supreme way.’[202] Charles Louis believed that the Parliamentarians were his true allies in this aim. Rupert therefore found himself, at the end of 1643, fighting rebels, courtiers, and even his own brother.
Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier Page 14