Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier

by Charles Spencer

  Rupert and Maurice had spent much of the war on the list of Royalists who would be shown no mercy if captured. However, Parliament now knew of Rupert’s efforts for peace, and sympathised with his hatred of Digby and the so-called Papist faction. Rupert had sounded out the enemy in May: ‘Pray see if you can find Sir Thomas Fairfax will think me worthy to receive an obligation from him by setting his thought upon the means of providing for some place of liberty and safety for me.’[347] Now he would find out what the rebels intended to do with him.

  The capitulation took place on 24 June 1646, a day of heavy summer rain. Rupert, for the second time in a year, headed the procession of the vanquished. Oxford still had six months of supplies and seventy barrels of gunpowder when it yielded to the enemy. However, with the king a prisoner and the field army repeatedly defeated, the Royalist wartime headquarters was redundant. Two thousand men followed Rupert out of the town, ‘well armed, with colours flying and drums beating’.[348] Nine hundred of them chose to return peacefully to their homes, while the greater part sought service overseas: the Thirty Years’ War was nearing its climax on the Continent, assuring ready employment.

  Fairfax gave Rupert and Maurice more generous terms than their uncle had offered them after the fall of Bristol. After animated debate, Parliament was prepared to allow the princes to stay in England for six months, attended by a retinue that included grooms, footmen, an apothecary, a gunsmith, a tailor, and two washerwomen. Among the more exalted company permitted to remain with them were Lord Craven, de la Roche, de Gomme, and Dr Watts, Rupert’s chaplain. In return, the princes had to promise not to approach within 20 miles of London. At the end of the six-month grace, they must go overseas, never to return: ‘A pass is to be granted to Rupert as is desired in his letter, with Maurice, and other gentlemen to go with them beyond Sea,’ reported a Parliamentary newspaper, ‘and without doubt, they may do themselves more good, and us less hurt, to serve the State of France, than against the Parliament of England. Let them march, it is an old Proverb, “Lay an Enemy a bridge of gold”.’[349]

  Fairfax waived the exclusion zone so Rupert and Maurice could ride to Oatlands, on the outskirts of the capital, to meet their elder brother, Charles Louis. Now that it looked likely that the Palatine would be his, the two younger princes wanted to know if Charles Louis planned for them to benefit from the family’s restoration. Meanwhile, the Holy Roman Emperor had asked Charles Louis to establish whether his two younger brothers would be bound by the peace terms he was offering.

  However, Rupert and Maurice were early victims of the growing tension between Fairfax’s Puritan New Model Army and the predominantly Presbyterian Westminster. Prince Rupert’s papers recorded sourly: ‘The House of Commons, taking advantage of their coming within 20 miles of London, notwithstanding the liberty granted them by General Fairfax so to do, declared, June 26th, that [they] had broken the articles agreed upon [and ordered their party] to repair to the seaside within 10 days, and forthwith to depart the kingdom.’[350]

  The two brothers quit England in separate directions: Maurice sailed for Holland on 8 July, while Rupert left for France, three days earlier.

  Chapter Thirteen - French General

  ‘Why hast not thou Prince Rupert and thou Prince Maurice obeyed the voice of her good Parliament, what a Devil made you stay so long in England? ... But you would stay volens nolens until you lost all, and now you must be enforced to go, and carry your cruelties, your plunderings and all the mischief; you have done along with you, to make you the more welcome into another country.’

  A true Copy of the Welch Sermon Preached Before the two Princes, Prince Rupert and Prince Maurice at Dover, September 1646

  Rupert travelled directly from Calais to St Germain, the palace that housed Queen Henrietta Maria and her displaced Royalist court. The Prince of Wales had joined his mother there, after brief stays on the Scilly Isles and Jersey, and gave his cousin an enthusiastic welcome. Rupert recalled that the greeting he received from France’s Queen Regent, Anne of Austria, was more fulsome than the one accorded him by his aunt, the hostile Henrietta Maria.

  The prince arrived at a time of embarrassing family scandal. His hot-headed 18-year-old brother Philip had been delayed in his posting to the army of the Venetian Republic and had remained at The Hague during the summer of 1646. As a result, he witnessed at first hand the posturing of a young and charming Frenchman, Jacques d’Epinay, Sieur de Vaux. D’Epinay was witty and good-looking, and had quickly become a popular figure at Elizabeth of Bohemia’s court: indeed, he publicly hinted that he had become extremely intimate with the widowed queen, who was clearly dazzled by his attentions. Investigations by jealous onlookers revealed that d’Epinay had been forced to leave the French court after seducing the lover of his patron, the Duke of Orleans.

  Elizabeth’s children were humiliated by the rumours surrounding their mother and her controversial admirer. One day, finding the queen walking with d’Epinay in the rain, Charles Louis knocked the favourite’s hat from his head and berated him for wearing it in the royal presence. Elizabeth angrily turned on her son, explaining that she had given d’Epinay permission to do so.

  The scandal reached new heights when d’Epinay boasted of his ‘bonnes fortunes’ with not just the queen, but also her favourite daughter, Princess Louise. Prince Philip, furious at the insult to his family’s honour, challenged d’Epinay to a duel. However, the contest was prevented at the last moment. The following day Philip encountered d’Epinay in the street and sprung on him in a furious attack. Before he could be restrained, he had plunged his hunting knife into the Frenchman’s neck and killed him.

  The queen was appalled by her son’s violence and by the death of her devotee. She refused to hear Philip’s words of explanation and told him that she would never see him again. Princess Elizabeth spoke in defence of her brother and was similarly banished: she travelled to Brandenburg, to stay with cousins, and never again lived with her mother. With the French in The Hague demanding that Philip pay for his crime, he rode for the coast and sailed to Denmark, before progressing to Hamburg. There he began to raise troops for his Venetian commission.

  Rupert and Charles Louis wrote to their mother, begging her to forgive Philip. Rupert’s letter does not survive, but Charles Louis’s does:

  Madam,

  My brother Rupert sending this bearer to your Majesty about this business, I cannot omit to accompany him with my humble request in favour of the suit he hath to you in my brother’s behalf; which, since he can more fully represent it to your Majesty, and that I have by the last post acquainted you with it, I will not be farther troublesome therein. Only, Madam, give me leave to beg your pardon in my brother Philip’s behalf, which I should have done sooner if I had thought that he needed it.

  The consideration of his youth, of the affront he received, of the blemish [that] had lain upon all of his lifetime if he had not resented it; but much more that of his blood, and of his nearness to you, and to him whose ashes you have ever professed more love and value than to anything upon earth, cannot be sufficient to efface any ill impression which the unworthy representation of the fact by those whose joy is in the divisions of our family, may have made in your mind against him.

  But I hope I am deceived in what I hear of this, and that this precaution of mine will seem but impertinent, and will more justly deserve forgiving than my brother’s action; so I will still be confident that the good of your children, the honour of your family, and your own will prevail with you against any other consideration: and thus I rest Your Majesty’s most humble and obedient servant,

  Charles

  This 10th of July, 1646.[351]

  The siblings’ unity of purpose seems eventually to have softened the queen’s heart. Two years later, we hear of Prince Philip at The Hague, with Rupert and Maurice. However, Philip’s tale had no happy ending: in 1650, while serving as a cavalry colonel in the Spanish army at the siege of Rethel, he was killed leading his men into action
.

  *

  Rupert soon realised that the end of the war had not brought a close to the rivalries that had riven Charles’s closest supporters during the conflict. Faction politics thrived at St Germain. Although one of Henrietta Maria’s favourites, Henry Jermyn, was friendly towards Rupert, the malevolent Digby had also taken root in this disaffected environment. With the king detained by the Scots — they had effectively kidnapped the monarch, while claiming they were offering him ‘protection’ — and no hope of the court being brought under control, Rupert decided to move on. Anne of Austria offered him any role in her son Louis XIV’s armies that he desired, and he accepted her invitation. His sole condition was that he must be at ‘liberty of entering into the service of [King Charles] wheresoever the state of his affairs would permit it’.[352] This was agreed.

  Rupert asked for and received the rank of mareschal de camp, the equivalent of an English brigadier general. He was given ‘a Regiment of Foot, a Troop of Horse, and the command of all the English in France’,[353] amounting to 1,400 men. His senior officers included Rokeby, Sandys, Tillier, Holles, Hawkins, and Lunsford — many of them familiar from the prince’s Civil War campaigns.

  It was an exciting time for a foreign mercenary to fight for France: its alliance with Sweden was proving vigorously successful against the ailing Spanish Habsburgs. The French army was in the initial stage of a transformation that would see it mature into the mightiest military Juggernaut that Europe had seen since the fall of the Roman Empire.

  From the end of Louis XIII’s reign, the French cavalry had developed into a decisive battlefield force. In 1639, plans for a military stud were first mooted: its role was to produce numbers of strong, fast horses, for use in the Thirty Years’ War. Four years later such forward planning was vindicated by the success of Conde’s squadrons at the battle of Rocroi — a startling and compelling victory over Spain. This marked the beginning of six decades of triumphs on land, uninterrupted until defeat at the hands of the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy, at Blenheim, in 1704. In 1646, the year of Rupert’s arrival in France, Marshal Turenne was given command of the combined Franco-Swedish forces in Germany. It was the start of a career that spanned thirty years, during which time he was to become Louis’s greatest general.

  It was a relief for the prince to find a reasonably senior role in an army ably led, without the distraction of domestic or court politics: he could concentrate on military matters and leave Henrietta Maria’s band of self-serving dependants far away, to stew in their own bile. ‘Her Majesty of England’s servants begin to look sad,’ The Moderate Intelligencer gloated from across the Channel, ‘wages hath been wanting 17 months, and few big boons are there to be had, wheels go round, that sometimes above, is anon below; every up hill, hath a down hill.’[354] Everything seemed to be going wrong for the court-in-exile: ‘Prince Charles has the spice of a fever’, Mercurius Diutinus reported, ‘but is now very well again and merry, desiring rather to come to the Parliament of England than be anywhere: Provided it be with (the King) his Father’s leave. But the English Lords, and Officers in France, their hearts are all broke to pieces in madness.’[355]

  Free from this atmosphere of negativity, Rupert busied himself recruiting for the coming campaign. He sent old colleagues to Britain, to cajole former stalwarts into joining his ranks. ‘Sir,’ he wrote to Sir John Owen, a Welshman with a distinguished Civil War record, ‘I have taken this opportunity of Colonel Donnell’s coming into your country to make his levies, to invite you into the King of France’s service, where I have taken conditions to command all the English, and should be glad that you would raise men for his service.’ Rupert pointed at the generous rates of pay available in the French army: ‘The particular condition you will receive from Colonel Donnell, which are much better than other Princes give.’[356] This element would have appealed greatly to Rupert: he had left England no richer than he had been on his arrival. Louis’s liberal pay was extremely welcome.

  *

  For the prince, the 1647 campaign was busy and dangerous. Reports reached Paris that 20,000 Spaniards were besieging Armentières northwest of Lille: if reinforcements could not come quickly, the border town must fall. Mazarin ordered Rupert to help relieve it. He joined a small French force of 7,000 men, jointly commanded by two marshals, Gassion and Rantzau. They were both ten years Rupert’s senior, and they were both remarkable men.

  Count Gassion was a Calvinist from Pau, in the Pyrenees. He had seen extensive service during the 1630s, first in Bavaria and central Germany, then in Lorraine, Flanders, and the Artois. His portrait shows a handsome, dark-haired man with a fine moustache, a tightly clipped beard, and an air of disgruntled impatience: Gassion was committed to soldiery, to the exclusion of all else, including his personal safety. He had vowed always to remain single, since he foresaw that his life would end on the battlefield and he did not want to leave behind a widow.

  The count had risen quickly to the pinnacle of the French army. A mareschal de camp at the battle of Rocroi, he had urged his commander, the Prince de Condé, to attempt a bold cavalry manoeuvre that owed much to Gustavus Adolphus’s tactics. Condé accepted the advice and unleashed a sweeping attack against the Spanish Tercios — substantial infantry formations that had previously enjoyed a reputation for impregnability. The plan worked spectacularly: the Habsburg positions were cracked open and overwhelmed. Gassion’s reward for his part in the victory was a marshal’s baton — the last of the thirty-four gained during Louis XIII’s three-decade reign.

  Gassion’s style of command relied on his personal bravery and ruthlessness. In January 1646 The Moderate Intelligencer reported a doomed piece of Spanish skulduggery: ‘The Enemy had formed an enterprise upon the Town of Armentières, by means of intelligence he held with some of the burghers; but it was discovered by the care of Marshal Gassion, who hanged a captain to whom the government of the place had been promised, six burghers, and five soldiers.’ After beating up the surrounding Habsburg forces and capturing all the personal goods of its general, the Marquis of Caracone, Gassion returned to Armentières ‘wherein he proceeds with Justice against all the rest that are discovered to have dipped their fingers in this foul treachery.’[357]

  Gassion’s fellow commander was also a Protestant — Josias Rantzau, a German from near Kiel. A dogged warrior who had twice been a prisoner of war, he had left various body parts across the battlegrounds of Europe. Fighting in turn for the Dutch, the Danes, the Swedes, the Imperialists, and then the French, he accumulated sixty wounds, his most notable losses being an arm, an ear, an eye, and a leg. When he finally died, his epitaph dwelt on his astonishing physical resilience:

  Of the body of Rantzau, this is only one of the parts,

  The other half remains in the place of Mars.

  It dispersed everywhere its members and its glory,

  Pruned though it was, it remained victorious

  Its blood was, in a hundred places, the price of victory

  And Mars did not leave him anything complete but his heart.

  It was Rantzau’s exemplary personal courage, rather than his strategic ability, that had secured his selection as one of Louis XIV’s first marshals. He was also governor of Dunkirk.

  Personal valour and religion apart, Gassion and Rantzau had little in common. They share the distinction, however, of being unwittingly responsible for a sartorial legacy that lives on today. The two marshals championed the use of Croatian hussars, which they deployed as nimble, ruthless auxiliaries. The Croats wore thin white scarves around their necks, those of the officers made of silk, while the men’s were of coarser material. These garments were gifts from their wives — reminders to be faithful while far from home and valiant in battle.

  The French noted the casual élan of this garment, which they called the ‘ Kravata’ — a bastardised version of their term for Croatia. They contrasted its all-round practicality with the chore of keeping their own lace ruffs stiff and brilliant, and
adopted the cravat for themselves. The tie’s popularity in western Europe can therefore be traced back to Gassion and Rantzau’s reliance on exotic Croatian horsemen. This curious association aside, the two marshals were awkward colleagues: they were poor communicators, a fact that hindered the relief of Armentières.

  Prince Rupert arrived in the French camp outside the town at night-time and was greeted by Gassion with the ominous promise: ‘You will see a brave action here tomorrow.’[358] The next day Gassion took Rupert and two others to reconnoitre the enemy lines on the far side of the River Lys. They used hedges as cover to approach the water’s edge, before Gassion signalled to his companions to wait where they were until he called for them. Prince Rupert’s Logbook recorded what happened next: ‘Gassion was got up to a little house upon the side of the river, like a ferry-house, and the Prince in the meantime heard the stroke of an oar, as if a boat were rowing over the river, but he durst not give Gassion any notice of it for fear of being overheard, and discovering him to the enemy. The Marshal stayed there till the people out of the boat were landed, who sent one before them to see if the house were clear; but as Gassion was peeping at the army from behind the house one way, this discoverer was just upon the back of him at the other end of the house.’[359]

  Gassion was wearing a cape in the Spanish style. This, together with his quick-wittedness, saved his life. ‘What the devil do you here?’ he bellowed at the enemy soldier, pretending that he was a Habsburg commander. ‘Get you gone to your quarter!’ The marshal took advantage of the soldier’s momentary confusion and sprinted back to where Rupert was hiding. ‘Mon Dieu!’ cursed Gassion, getting his breath back, ‘this is always happening to me!’ The prince replied, dryly: ‘I don’t doubt that at all, if you do things like that often.’[360] The men then galloped back to the French camp.