Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier

by Charles Spencer

  Digby’s mature eloquence echoed the general yearning for peaceful reconciliation. The executioner was employed not in the snapping of spines or the severing of heads, but in the public burning of John Milton’s republican books. Only those whose hands were indelibly stained with Charles I’s blood could expect no pardon. Royalists had warned during their years of impotence that: ‘Natural men ... upon the violent death of their King (even after a good successor was possessed) have never rested till the doers were punished.’[502] Now they were, at last and unexpectedly, in a position to administer vengeance. Twelve of the surviving forty-one Regicides were hanged, drawn, and quartered. ‘I saw not their executions,’ John Evelyn wrote on 17 October, when four were despatched at Charing Cross, ‘but met their quarters mangled and cut and reeking as they were brought from the gallows in baskets on the hurdle. Oh the miraculous providence of God!’[503]

  One of the executed was Hugh Peters. The jury had heard sworn evidence of his extreme hatred of Royalists in general, and of three figures in particular: Charles I, Charles II, and Prince Rupert. Peters was exceptionally unpopular: the noise from the crowd was so loud and so gleeful as he mounted the ladder, as the halter was placed around his neck, and after his head was cut off, that one onlooker wrote that it sounded like the nation was celebrating a great military victory.

  Not even death could spare Charles I’s tormentors from the settling of scores. The coffins of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw — president at the king’s trial — were prised open and their carrion hauled off to Tyburn, the place of execution for London’s common criminals. There the corpses were suspended for a day, their decomposed rankness a source of lurid fascination to those who had witnessed the trio in their prime. At sunset the three cadavers were beheaded, their skulls stuck on poles on top of Westminster Hall — the building where they had tried and sentenced the king. The rest of their remains were thrown into a deep hole under the gallows. In Cambridge, eighteen years earlier, Cromwell had first declared his armed opposition to the Crown. His horse had thrown him off, depositing him beneath the town’s gallows. The superstitious had claimed at the time that this was a sign that Cromwell’s final resting place would be under the noose. Now, they were finally proved right.

  The bones of Rupert’s naval nemesis, Robert Blake, were treated with greater respect. Blake had been given a hero’s burial in Henry VII’s Chapel, after his death in August 1657. His coffin was now removed from this select resting place and interred in the churchyard outside — still a site of great honour.

  *

  Rupert had visited England as a restlessly energetic teenager, before returning to serve as a cavalry commander in his uncle’s wars. He had intended to return after the Coronation — in order, his family suspected, to avoid the huge expense of taking part in the ceremony and its attendant celebrations. However, he had merely got his timing wrong, a news-sheet in The Hague reporting on 11 June that: ‘Prince Palatine Rupert came hither lately, thinking to have met the King of England, but he was gone before, therefore he went back to his Quarters, having had leave to be absent for only twelve days.’[504] Rupert had briefly found service in the Imperial army. In March 1660 he led the successful assault on a Swedish position at Warnemunde. The prince’s allegiance to the army that had defeated and imprisoned him as a young man, against the one that had given his father his brightest hope of restoration, underlined the profound reordering of European politics after the conclusion of the Thirty Years’ War.

  Rupert eventually arrived four months into Charles II’s reign. Samuel Pepys, the 27-year-old Clerk of the Acts on the Navy Board, wrote in his diary for 23 September 1660: ‘Prince Rupert came to Court, welcome to nobody.’[505] This was not entirely true: Charles II was delighted to see Rupert again, awarding him a generous sum from the annual pensions allotted his most loyal followers. There were 217 such grants, totalling just under £80,000 per annum. Of this, Rupert received £4,000. James, Duke of York, was similarly well disposed to the prince. The three royal relatives shared many tastes, in particular a passion for tennis, country sports, and scientific innovation. Charles and Rupert played tennis against each other with huge energy: the king would weigh himself before and after each contest, and once lost 41/2 lb during a particularly punishing match.

  While Grammont and Pepys were critical of Rupert at this time, others still noticed his charm. In October 1660, a friend of his mother Elizabeth wrote to assure her that: ‘I have had the honour to receive your Majesty’s letter by Prince Rupert: me thinks his Highness looks very well; every body here seems to look very graciously on him.’[506] This was heartening news for the queen, for Rupert had vowed to help put right her financial problems while in London. She had attempted to look after them herself, but one of her devotees had written from London: ‘Sir Thomas Treners soon will come to me and I shall not fail to inform your Majesty what his opinion is of what concerns your Majesty’s affairs, but I think the way to effect it is to get the Prince to speak with him for certain.’[507]

  Elizabeth returned to England in May 1661, nearly half a century after departing with girlish optimism for married life with Frederick V in Heidelberg. She had been bitterly disappointed by Charles Louis’s attitude to her: the queen had amassed heavy debts during her decades in exile and had hoped that he would mark his restoration to the Palatine by meeting her dues. He declined to do so, even refusing to help her retrieve her jewels from pawnbrokers when she left Rotterdam for England. Elizabeth felt sure that Charles Louis was unwilling to help, because ‘he does not think he deserves well enough of me to have them after my death. But I will leave him my debts and that will trouble him more.’[508]

  Her revenge came quicker than she could have expected: Elizabeth died of smallpox in February 1662 while staying at Leicester House, Lord Craven’s London home. Rupert was by her side when she expired and was chief mourner at her funeral. She bequeathed her debts to Charles Louis, trinkets to her other children (apart from Louise, who had been Elizabeth’s favourite daughter, but whose conversion to Catholicism could never be forgiven: she was not mentioned in the Will), and all her remaining assets to Rupert. This included her jewels and the hunting lodge at Rhenen, which Charles Louis had recently claimed as his own. Elizabeth had seen off this contention by reminding Charles Louis that Frederick V had bought the property for her. No son could withdraw his father’s gift.

  The Elector tried to minimise his losses, sending assessors to see what could be seized from his mother’s apartments to please her creditors. Rupert was quicker off the mark, though, and ordered Elizabeth’s rooms to be sealed. When Charles Louis insisted that his man be allowed to enter, Rupert denied him access. Having been left as his mother’s executor, Rupert for once had power over Charles Louis and he was not afraid to use it. Elizabeth’s Will took the brothers’ relationship past breaking point.

  *

  With a king reinstated, the nation required a queen. Charles was already a proven breeder, his time in exile on the Continent resulting in numerous affairs, some of which produced children. The monarch now needed a wife of royal blood, who could legitimise his fertility and provide an heir.

  Such a question was very much bound up in the nation’s foreign policy requirements. Although France had sided with Cromwell during the latter’s Protectorate, this unhappy decision was blamed on Cardinal Mazarin. Louis XIV, Charles’s first cousin, was keen to establish good relations with Britain and keep her out of Spain’s orbit. When Catharine of Braganza, daughter of Rupert’s erstwhile protector, John IV of Portugal, was proposed as a bride, Louis XIV endorsed the choice, seeing it as an insult to the Spanish Habsburgs, who were still smarting from the loss of Portugal. Parliament was unhappy about a match with a Catholic, but the lure of a superb dowry persuaded Charles to override their objections: Catharine brought £360,000 in cash, as well as the exotic outposts of Bombay and Tangier. Tangier was especially attractive, providing an alternative Mediterranean staging post for British merchantmen to
Cadiz or Lisbon, and Rupert was appointed one of the commissioners for its government.

  Rupert, who had become one of the forty or so Privy Councillors the previous month, rode with Charles to meet the new arrival as she alighted at Portsmouth, in May 1662. The impression made by the Infanta and her retinue was deeply unfortunate: the girl had a temperature and a cough, and on setting foot on English soil requested a cup of tea, which, up until this point, was an extremely rare drink (the new queen helped to put tea on its path to national popularity). Moreover, her ladies-in-waiting were of a mesmerising plainness. They were in the charge of the Countess of Panetra, and Count Grammont judged them: ‘six frights, who called themselves maids of honour, and a Duenna, another monster, who took the title of governess to those extraordinary beauties’.[509] To a nation in thrall to the latest fashions, the Portuguese women’s attire was comically dowdy: they wore guardenfantos, dresses whose boxlike structure neutralised the feminine form, leaving the wearer sexless.

  The Infanta’s illness slightly worsened over the following weeks: ‘Many impute this indisposition of the Queen’s to the cough she got on shipboard,’ a correspondent informed the Duchess of Beaufort, ‘but more to her ill diet, which, I believe, is the strangest you ever heard of, and she cannot yet bring herself to eat English meat; it is either eggs and sugar, or eggs and lard, and now and then a burnt lean pullet (for the Portuguese complain that all our meat is too fat), and she eats so little of all this, that it is almost impossible she can receive any nourishment by it.’[510]

  Equally remarkable to a court quickly infected by its king’s love of lightness and pleasure, was Catharine’s religious devotion. Her retinue contained six priests, and she professed astonishment at the amount of time the English ladies took to dress and beautify themselves, wondering innocently how they were left with enough time to complete their duties to God.

  All of these foreign, Catholic, ways would have been acceptable, if Catharine had succeeded in her principal role of procreating. There were pregnancies, but they all miscarried. Even if they had succeeded, it is most unlikely that she would have succeeded in breaking her husband’s addiction to the many beauties that attended his court.

  The barrenness of the marriage, and the death to smallpox in September 1660 of ‘that incomparable Prince’, the 21-year-old Duke of Gloucester, left Rupert the third most important man in the royal family. The Duke of York had a son, Charles, late in 1660, whose christening Rupert attended, but the baby’s life was brief. Records of royal occasions and meetings always place Rupert after Charles and the Duke of York in seniority, and ahead of every other attendant.

  It was clear that Rupert would be rewarded for past loyalty, as and when the possibility arose. His move to London coincided with Parliament paying off most of the army and part of the navy, to stop ‘the vast expense of the nation.’ The king approved the disbandment of 15 garrisons, 21 infantry regiments, 15 cavalry regiments, and 22 warships in England, with further cuts in Scotland.

  Despite there being no military position for him in England, the prince had no incentive to stay on the Continent. He had hoped to serve the Emperor against the Turks and had travelled to Vienna in April 1661, to explore possibilities. Two months later, he wrote optimistically to Will Legge: ‘A friend of mine, at my coming, assured me that there were but two difficulties which hindered my advancement to the generalship of the Horse: the one was my being no Roman [Catholic]; the other, that the Marquis [Margrave] of Baden and General Zelzing-maister de Sancha had taken ill, if I was advanced before them; and as he thought both these small impediments might easily be come over, especially the first, on which he was afraid most did depend. I can see so small preparations for a war against the Turks, otherwise than for a defencing one, in which, roasting in the sun and getting sickness will be the greatest danger.’[511]

  Although the Emperor and his heir encouraged Rupert to apply for the Generalship of Horse, the Imperial ministers refused to pay the prince what he was owed from the Peace of Munster. They were also extremely reluctant to offer the level of remuneration that Rupert expected for holding such a senior rank. The prince was disappointed, while acknowledging: ‘It is true that money is a scarce commodity in great request in this Court.’[512] In September 1661 the Prince’s youngest sister, Sophie, wrote to Charles Louis from Hanover: ‘Mr Blum who is here told us this news, that Prince Rupert is returned to England dissatisfied with the Imperial Court because of a dispute over an army rank.’[513]

  Rupert’s mood darkened further when he was sent a copy of a book, The Frondage, which contained harsh criticism of his Civil War record, while strongly praising Cromwell’s. ‘One Harris translated it,’ Rupert complained to Will Legge. ‘Pray, enquire after the book, and judge if it were not a Scotch trick to send it ... I am confident if Honest Will had read the book, he had broken the translator’s head.’[514]

  The prince decided to move to England, lock, stock, and barrel. An inveterate country sportsman, he planned to bring over his illustrious pack of hunting dogs. Tidying up his affairs in Vienna in the autumn of 1661, Rupert boasted to Will Legge: ‘The Emperor is gone to Ebersdorf, nine leagues off, where he expects my greyhounds, to course a stag.’[515] Rupert knew each of his dogs individually. When his lead hound was waning, he asked a favour of Legge: ‘If my Lord Lindsay be at Court, [please remember my service to] him, with the doleful news that poor Rayall at this time is dying, after being the cause of the death of many a stag. By Heaven’, he continued, ‘I had rather lose the best horse in my stable!’[516] He also loved his horses: all his best mounts crossed the Channel via Dunkirk, while the prince made his way to England once more from Rotterdam. With him came large quantities of his preferred, German, Moselle wines. The transport of so many favourite things indicates that Rupert’s move from the Continent to England was always intended to be permanent. He arrived in England in November 1661. From that point until his death, it was home.

  *

  The prince was quick to find outlets for his key interests in his adoptive land. Rupert’s name appears as the third entry, after his two royal cousins, in the list of founding members of the Royal Society. Lord Orford referred to the prince as a ‘philosophic warrior’[517], but Rupert’s fascination with science and the advancement of knowledge was not unusual among the upper echelons of English society. In dedicating much of his time to such pursuits, he was very much the product of a questioning age. It was the Restoration that led to the formalisation of a system of enquiry that had been growing in England since the beginning of the century.

  Sir Francis Bacon had been an influential champion in this field during the reign of Rupert’s grandfather, James I. In 1603 he wrote Of the Interpretation of Nature, which can be viewed as the blueprint for his later intellectual pursuits. In the four years before he became Lord Chancellor, between 1614 and 1618, he produced the New Atlantis, which proposed the foundation of a scientific body of twenty-four members: half of these were to travel, collecting foreign literature; three were to digest and dissect the thoughts contained in these books; a further three were to look for foreign mechanisms that could be adapted for use in England; another trio was to process experimental data from such machinery and look for leads towards further invention; and the remaining three were to be wise men, charged with taking an overview of all these elements of advancement, to the betterment of mankind’s day-to-day existence.

  Bacon sought a system of knowledge that was logical, useful, and proof-based, governed by a troop of wise men occupying what he called a ‘house of Salomon’: ‘Those, therefore, who determine not to conjecture and guess,’ urged Bacon, ‘but to find out and know; not to invent fables and romances of worlds, but to look into and to dissect the nature of this real world, must consult only things themselves.’[518] Bacon’s insistence on conducting his own experiments cost him his life: while testing his theory that ice could delay putrefaction, he packed a dead chicken with snow, catching a fatal chill in the process. By the ti
me of his death this doyen of the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts had helped to popularise a brand of experimental science known as the ‘new philosophy’.

  Bacon’s core belief, that the quest for learning should be fostered by noble men with superior minds, survived the strife of the Civil War. By the time of the battle of Naseby, a group of a dozen Parliamentarian intellectuals was regularly meeting in London, to discuss experiments and theories over lunch. Among them was Dr Wilkins, Puritan chaplain to Rupert’s brother Charles Louis, and Robert Boyle, whose innovative work with air pumps and gases led him to formulate ‘Boyle’s Law’. After the war, the Philosophical Society began to flourish in Oxford — again with Parliamentary champions. Wilkins was once more to the fore, hosting meetings in his room at Wadham College — ‘then the place of resort for virtuous and learned men’.[519] The Wadham conversations were recorded and published for wider circulation.

  Theodore Haak was another influential man of learning with a connection to Rupert’s family. Haak was a Palatine subject who had helped raise funds in England during James I’s reign, in the hope of restoring his elector by force of arms. Haak was a keen student of Bacon’s texts and also of the teachings of John Amos Comenius. Comenius was a philosopher exasperated by the arcane approach to education of the two universities. Oxford and Cambridge refused to teach mathematics, or to break free from the Classical texts and medieval customs that had dominated learning for so long. John Milton was swayed by Comenius’s advocacy of modern, inclusive scholarship and it influenced his writings on education.

  The diarist John Evelyn, a keen champion of learning and the author or interpreter of twenty-five books, was another enthusiast for the new philosophy. He wanted its different strands brought together in a cohesive way. Frustrated by the Protectorate’s refusal to help the march of intellectual progress, Evelyn wrote to Boyle in 1659 with plans for a system based on benevolent paternalism: ‘Since we are not to hope for a Mathematical College, much less a Salomon’s House ... why might not some gentlemen, whose geniuses are greatly suitable, and who desire nothing more than to give a good example, preserve science, and cultivate themselves, join together in a society and resolve upon some orders and economy, to be mutually observed, such as shall best become the end of their union?’[520]