Rupert sought an immediate redress of Willis’s grievances. The prince, Maurice, Gerard, and more than twenty of their followers burst in on the king while he was dining with Bellasis and his supporters. Charles sprang to his feet, startled at the invasion of his private quarters. Willis demanded that the king justify the dishonour done to him, before Rupert explained that he would offer Willis every support, since it was Willis’s friendship with the prince that had cost him the governorship. Gerard, encouraged by his comrades’ candour, went further, claiming ‘that the appointment of Lord Bellasis was Digby’s doing, that Digby was a traitor, and that he could prove him so.’[325]
John Evelyn wrote about this charged encounter in his famous diary: ‘Digby’s character, however, was supported by Bellasis, the governor, and several others; but the Princes, Rupert and Maurice, sided with Gerard. At length swords were drawn, and the King rushed in to part them ...’[326] With peace restored, Charles agreed to speak to Willis — but only privately. However, Willis insisted that his complaint be dealt with in public. The king, his shock turning to anger, ordered Willis, Rupert, and their entire party, to leave the room. He then summoned his other generals ‘and it was debated what course to take with these wild Cavaliers.’[327]
On reflection, Rupert and his partisans accepted that they had behaved with ill-considered haste. The ruffling of Charles’s dignity demanded, and received, an immediate apology:
May It Please Your Most Excellent Majesty,
Whereas in all humility, we came to present ourselves this day unto your Majesty, to make our several grievances known, we find we have drawn upon us some misconstruction of the manner of that, by reason your Majesty thought it appeared as a mutiny. We shall therefore with all humbleness and clearness present unto Your Majesty, That we the persons subscribed, who from the beginning of this unhappy war, have given testimony to Your Majesty and the world, of our fidelity and zeal to Your Majesty’s Person and Cause, do think ourselves as unhappy to lie under that censure, and as we know in our consciences, our selves innocent and free from it; We do in all humility therefore (lest we should hazard ourselves upon a second misinterpretation) present these Reasons of our humblest Desires unto Your Sacred Majesty rather in writing than personally, which are these:
That many of us, entrusted in high commands in Your Majesty’s service, have not only our Commissions taken away, without any reasons or causes expressed, whereby our Honours are blemished to the World, our Fortunes ruined, and we rendered incapable of trust or command from any foreign Princes, but many others (as we have cause to fear) designed to suffer in the same manner.
Our Intentions in our addressing ourselves to Your Majesty were, and our submissive Desires now are, That Your Majesty will be graciously pleased, that such of us as now labour under the opinion of Unworthiness, and incapacity to serve Your Majesty, may at a Council of War receive knowledge of the causes of Your Majesty’s displeasure, and have the Justice and Liberty of our Defences against what can be alleged against us, and in particular concerning this Government.
And if upon the severest Examination, our Integrity and Loyalty to Your Majesty shall appear, that then Your Majesty will be graciously pleased, to grant us either Reparation in Honour against the calumny of our Enemies, or liberty to pass into other parts ...[328]
It was clear that Rupert, Maurice, and their twenty co-signatories — all senior Royalist figures — knew the king’s cause to be lost. Before long, they would be obliged to seek military employment overseas and they needed to have their reputations cleared. Unless this happened, other rulers might shun their services.
Charles summoned Rupert and Maurice to an awkward meeting, where much was left unsaid. The king told his nephews that he welcomed their constant support, given the desperation of his position. He assured them of his continued trust, before contradicting himself by warning them that switching allegiance would lead to their eternal shame.
Rupert restated his loyalty to his uncle and asked the king to state openly that the princes’ clique had not attempted mutiny. This Charles agreed to do — but it appears that Rupert was unconvinced by this assurance and remained concerned by his uncle’s hesitancy. On leaving the king’s presence, the two brothers went to consult Gerard. They concluded that Digby and his faction were too firmly in favour for the king to treat them fairly or honourably. With regret, they decided to quit Newark.
The king watched from a castle window as the princes led away 400 of their supporters. Eyewitnesses recalled seeing tears in Charles’s eyes as the column rode off.
*
Rupert took his men to Worton House, 14 miles from Newark. They later moved to Belvoir Castle, from where the prince wrote to Parliament on 29 October:
My Lords and Gentlemen,
Having determined, with my brother Prince Maurice, my Lord Stanley, Lord Gerard, Sir Richard Willis, and many other Officers and Gentlemen, to leave this Kingdom, being altogether disengaged from the service we have been in, it hath given me the occasion to desire this favour from you, that you would grant a pass and safe convoy for me, my brother Prince Maurice and these Noblemen and Gentlemen that came along with me, together with their servants, horses, and all necessaries, to go beyond the seas or to retire to their houses, as shall be most convenient for them. And I engage my honour for myself and them, that no act of hostility shall be done by us, and that there is no other design in our journey, but to go wherever our particular occasion or design shall lead us ...
Your Friend and Servant,
Rupert[329]
Parliament reacted with suspicion, unable to accept Rupert’s transformation from feared enemy to humble supplicant: ‘To me it seems a mystery’, wrote The Scottish Dove, ‘that the two German Princes, and 400 officers so much spoken of five weeks since, should seem to go out of the King’s Garrison from Newark in discontent, and send in such haste to desire the Parliament’s Pass to go beyond Sea, &c.’[330] Members asked Rupert’s emissary, Colonel Henry Osborne, to give them more details: what were the prince’s true intentions? Osborne was blunt: if the Parliamentarians failed to agree to the terms spelt out in his master’s letter, Rupert would return to serve the king. This clarification caused such consternation, Osborne writing to his master, ‘that, to draw you from that, they will consent to anything’.
In the same letter Osborne relayed rumours circulating in London from overseas. There was little good to report: Henrietta Maria was said to have accused Rupert publicly of selling Bristol to the enemy; and Rupert’s younger brother Prince Edward was alleged to have converted to Catholicism after falling in love with the Queen of Poland’s sister, prompting the Pope and the Emperor to favour him as the next Elector Palatine. Princess Elizabeth, Rupert and Edward’s eldest sister, summed up the family’s shame in a letter to her friend Rene Descartes: ‘If you take the trouble to read the gazette, you must be aware that he has fallen into the hands of a certain sort of people who have more hatred to our family than love of their own worship, and has allowed himself to be taken in their snares to change his religion and become a Roman Catholic, without making the least pretence which could impose on the most credulous that he was following his conscience. And I must see one whom I loved with as much tenderness as I know how to feel, abandoned to the scorn of the world and the loss of his own soul (according to my creed).’[331]
More promising was Osborne’s news that: ‘At the last fight of my Lord Digby, he lost all his letters, which the Parliament took, and three score ciphers, by which they have deciphered most of the letters, which, before, they could make nothing of. And, this afternoon, a committee hath been reading many of them. Amongst the letters they last took, there was one from the King to your Highness, being an answer to a letter of yours, of July last, where you advised him to peace, and not to trust the Irish. This letter hath done you a great deal of right, and gained much of their good opinion.’[332] Rupert’s reputation as a bloodthirsty warmonger was gradually unravelling.
Osb
orne wrote the following week to warn that Parliament had decided to grant the prince a pass, but only if he promised never to serve the king again. Rupert had already waived his rights to fight one enemy, the Holy Roman Emperor. He was reluctant to make a similar commitment now, even though his uncle’s cause was clearly lost.
Captain Pickering, a Roundhead officer with a reputation for trustworthiness, took the conditional pass to Rupert at Worcester. Pickering’s mission was to discover the two princes’ intentions and then return to London immediately with his findings. Rupert and Maurice did not want to be rushed: they stalled the talks with Pickering while opening up a line of communication with the king through the Duke of Richmond. Pickering became restless: ‘When he had stayed some days,’ The Moderate Intelligencer reported, ‘he went to the Princes, to desire them to let him know if they would accept of the Parliament’s offer, that so he might return with an affirmative, or negative.’[333] The princes said they could not reply to Parliament until Osborne was safely returned from London. This was a fatuous argument, since Osborne had been delayed by illness, not by restraint. However, it won Rupert time to move with his retinue to Woodstock, from where he began to explore his options with the king.
Charles had travelled from Newark to Oxford. Four days after his return, the king pardoned and freed Will Legge. The rapprochement was incomplete: Charles refused to reinstate Legge as governor of the town. However, with Digby absent and the king increasingly despondent, Legge took the opportunity to advance Rupert’s cause. The first conversation he had with the king, on his release, involved Charles’s sorry retelling of his quarrel with his nephew. Legge was genuinely distressed at the news, viewing Rupert’s return to favour as the only, faint hope of Royalist success. ‘I have not hitherto lost a day without moving his Majesty to recall you’, Legge wrote to the prince on 21 November, ‘and truly this very day he protested to me he would count it a great happiness to have you with him ... The King says, as he is your uncle, he is in the nature of a parent to you, and swears if Prince Charles had done as you did, he would never see him without the same he desires from you.’[334] Charles was seeking an unreserved apology from his nephew.
‘My dearest Prince,’ Legge continued, five days later, ‘... I am of opinion you should write to your uncle, seeing your stay bath been so long in his quarters in Woodstock — you ought to do it; and if you offered your service to him yet, and submitted yourself to his disposing and advice, many of your friends think it could not be a dishonour, but rather the contrary, seeing he is a king, your uncle, and in effect a parent to you.’[335] But Rupert was not to be rushed, while Parliament’s offer of safe passage overseas remained an option. He tried to persuade the king to seek peace and insisted that he ‘put from him Digby and other Machiavellians’, but Charles countered that such requests were ‘no more than the Parliament demanded.’[336]
Seeing that Legge had failed to reconcile the prince to his uncle, other ardent Royalists chimed in. ‘If my prayers can prevail,’ wrote the Earl of Dorset, on Christmas Day 1645, ‘you shall not have the heart to leave us all in our saddest times; and if my advice were worthy of following, truly you should not abandon your uncle in the disastrous condition his evil stars have placed him. Let your resolution be as generous and great as is your birth and courage. Resolve, princely Sir, to sink or swim with the King; adjourn all particular respects or interests until the public may give way to such unlucky disputes.’[337]
During the winter of 1645-6, the prince remained at Woodstock. Troops joined him from the neighbouring Royalist garrisons of Wallingford, Banbury, and Oxford. While there, Rupert and Maurice considered serving the Venetian Republic, raising troops in Hamburg and marching them through Holland. However, they passed up this opportunity in favour of their younger brother, Philip, a teenager eager to rival his elder brothers’ military exploits. ‘I could wish,’ Charles Louis wrote to Elizabeth of Bohemia, ‘either my brother Rupert or Maurice would undertake the Venetian employment, my brother Philip being very young to undertake such a task.’[338]
Eventually the two princes elected to fight on, in their uncles’ name. Rupert wrote to Charles, acknowledging his poor conduct at Newark and enclosing a blank sheet of paper with his signature at the bottom: he was prepared to confess to whatever the king believed him to be guilty of. Charles was moved by this show of humility. ‘The Prince went to Oxford, and the King embraced him’, Prince Rupert’s diary recorded, ‘and, as has been said, repented much the ill usage of his nephew.’[339] The princes brought with them relatively few men: some had already returned to Charles, in Oxford; others had slipped away to other Royalist garrisons; and yet more had secretly negotiated places in the Roundheads’ ranks.
The brothers’ motive for rejoining their uncle stemmed from family loyalty, for the hope of any personal advancement or financial rewards was by now long gone: ‘The low, sad, despicable condition of the Royal party, confusion and despair, is spoken of very much among themselves,’ The Moderate Intelligencer reported with satisfaction, ‘that there is now no other means left in view, but the reward or encouragement of honour.’[340] ‘Poor cavalier,’ wrote another gloating rebel at the end of 1645, ‘thy condition is lamentable; though thou have Antichrist, the Pope, the Devil and all to thy friends, thou must submit.’[341]
Surrender became the Royalists’ theme. Chester, the last lifeline connecting Charles to his Irish recruiting ground, fell on 3 February 1646. Later in the month the southwestern army was defeated after a valiant display at Torrington. On 2 March the Prince of Wales sailed for the Scilly Isles. Lord Astley was forced to lay down the arms of Charles’s last field army, at Stow on the Wold, on 21 March. Oxford remained defiant, one of a handful of garrisons still in the king’s service.
Fairfax now closed in on the Royalist headquarters, arriving in front of the town on 22 April. ‘You may prove to what condition want will bring men,’ remembered Sir John Oglander. ‘The Lords at the siege of Oxford, through want of power and money, were so undervalued that you could hear a common soldier cry out in their watches, “Roundhead, fling me up half a mutton and I will fling thee down a Lord.”’[342]
The king realised that Digby’s fanciful hopes of salvation had come to nothing: the Pope was not going to finance an Irish invasion; and agents in Denmark, France, and Holland had failed to engage potential allies. Charles requested a return to Westminster, but was rejected by Parliament. It was clear that Oxford would soon fall and then the king would have no negotiating position. Rebel spies confirmed that Charles was contemplating flight. ‘The King is still in Oxford,’ Commissary Henry Ireton wrote to Fairfax, ‘but now (as it is thought) does again intend to get away if he can: we shall be as vigilant as we can to prevent it, & do our utmost duty if he attempt it.’[343]
‘About this time,’ noted Prince Rupert’s diary, ‘the King sent for the Prince, and desired him to go, with what force he could, to convoy, him to the Scots; which the Prince undertook, but would have a command under his Majesty’s hand, else not. The King was then in debate, whether to Ireland or Scotland.’[344] Rupert advised against relying on the Irish and said his uncle should only approach the Scots if sure of their loyalty. He asked the king to write a letter, confirming that Rupert had categorically advised against a risky journey to an uncertain Scottish reception. This Charles did, appreciative of his nephew’s concern, but convinced by the French ambassador, Montreuil, that the Scots would rally to their monarch.
During the early hours of 27 April Charles woke Rupert to say that he was immediately leaving Oxford for his northern kingdom. He would ride disguised as a servant, attending his chaplain, Dr Hudson, and the loyal John Ashburnham. Rupert asked to accompany them, but the king pointed out that the prince’s great height would compromise an already precarious mission. The two men parted, unaware that they would never meet again.
Charles handed himself over to the Scottish army as they besieged Newark. He was immediately forced to order Bellasis to surrender
the garrison, which he did on 8 May 1646. Oxford, Pendennis, Ragland, and Harlech were now the only places in England and Wales still in the king’s hands.
At Oxford, the confinement of the siege failed to curb Rupert’s appetite for action. One day, accompanied by Maurice, Gerard, and twenty others, he was riding outside the town walls when, recalled Prince Rupert’s diary: ‘The Parliament forces sent three bodies of horse against him, and they fell upon the Prince, and pressed him. There was some skirmishing, and two pages, Lord Gerard and Prince Maurice’s pages, were wounded by picketing; whereupon one of the enemy called, “Lord Gerard — capon-tail!” and challenged him; and a lieutenant of the enemy shot the Prince in the shoulder, and shook his hand, so that his pistol fell out of his hand, but it shot his enemy’s horse.’[345] The Roundheads tried to cut off Rupert’s retreat, but he managed to summon reinforcements. He then led his men in a brave charge that harked back to the glory days of the Cavaliers. The enemy reacted as their comrades had done in years gone by, opening fire prematurely, before buckling under the impact of the Royalists. Many of the rebels were driven into nearby marshland, allowing Rupert to lead his men back safely to Oxford.
It was clear to both sides that the siege could not continue for long. Fairfax sought Oxford’s immediate surrender, addressing his summons to Prince Rupert. However, the Prince passed the communication to Glemham — Oxford’s governor, and therefore the garrison commander. Glemham, obeying the king’s parting instructions, summoned a council of war. There were two main questions: how generous would Fairfax be with his terms; and what treatment could the most eminent Royalists expect from him? There was particular concern about the fate awaiting the king’s second son, the 12-year-old James, Duke of York. With the Prince of Wales overseas, the rebels insisted that he: ‘be delivered into the hands of Parliament to be disposed of according to their pleasure’.[346]
Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier Page 22