The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (34 page)

Henrietta Maria was naturally eager to be reunited with her youngest son, whom she hadn’t seen since he was three or four. Charles was reluctant to accede to her demands, because he knew she would try to convert Harry to her Catholic faith. When she promised to refrain from doing so, he gave way and the boy was sent to Paris. Whereupon his mother broke her promise. Charles was furious. Harry was distressed. He remembered how his father, in that last terrible meeting the night before his execution, had adjured him to remain true to the Church of England, and he had also conceived an intense devotion to his brother. On the other hand, starved of female affection for years, with the horrible memory of his father’s words and also of the death from consumption in 1650 of his only companion, his sister Elizabeth, he was delighted to be part of the family again, with his mother and little sister Minette, and anxious to please the Queen. In the end Charles’s will prevailed, as it usually did when he had set his mind to something, and Harry returned to the Hague. He hoped to be a soldier like his brother James. Meanwhile he amused himself with sport, especially tennis. A few years later, in 1658, when money was shorter than usual, it was even rumoured that he was going to earn his keep as a tennis coach. His story is sad, for he died of smallpox a few weeks after his brother’s restoration. Burnet says he had ‘a kind insinuating temper that was generally very acceptable’, and his death was ‘much lamented by all, but chiefly by the King; for he loved him better than the Duke of York, and was never in his whole life seen so much concerned as he was on this occasion’.

Chapter 13

Charles II (1649–85): A Merry and Cynical Monarch

In May 1640, a couple of weeks before his eleventh birthday, Charles, Prince of Wales, was sent in a coach to the House of Lords, the bearer of a letter from his father requesting the two Houses of Parliament to commute the sentence of death passed on Strafford to imprisonment, which, said the King, ‘would be an unspeakable contentment to me’. It was Henrietta Maria’s idea to entrust the mission to the Prince. Surely the sight of the boy coming to plead for his father’s minister would soften the hearts of Strafford’s enemies? She had miscalculated. The letter was refused, returned unopened, and Charles was sent home. This was the first humiliation he had experienced in a hitherto cherished and protected life. He would be compelled to endure many more over the next twenty years. Before he was sixteen, he was an exile, a refugee, dependent on others for mere subsistence.

In January 1649, when word came that the King was to be put on trial, Charles sent Parliament a letter signed by himself, otherwise blank, along with a note offering to make whatever concessions might be demanded in order to save his father’s life. He got no reply. A few days later he was a king without a kingdom.

Or perhaps not. The Scots had not been consulted about the King’s trial and sentence. For all but the most extreme Covenanters, it was a breach of the agreement they had made when they handed him over to the English parliament, with the stipulation that no harm should come to his person. Moreover, Charles had been King of Scotland as well as England, and it was their king who had been so barbarously and, in their view, illegally put to death. Accordingly, on 4 February, as soon as the news of the King’s execution reached the Scottish capital, Charles II was proclaimed king by the Chancellor of Scotland, the Earl of Loudoun, at the Mercat-cross in Edinburgh. A wave of feeling, indignation mixed with loyalty, ran through the land. The indignation was intensified a few weeks later when the Duke of Hamilton, who had led the Engagers so disastrously to defeat at Preston, followed the master he had served so inconsistently and incompetently to the block. Hamilton had been an erratic and ineffective figure. In
The Tale of Old Mortality
, Scott puts this epitaph for him into the mouth of an old woman: ‘That was him that lost his head at London. Folks said that it wasna a very guid ane, but it was aye a sair loss to him, puir gentleman.’ Nevertheless he was a Scottish nobleman, a descendant of Scottish kings, and the treason with which he had been charged was no treason either to Scotland or its monarch.

So Scotland offered hope and opportunity to the young Charles II, a better chance certainly than Ireland of regaining his thrones, though his mother with characteristic lack of political sense was urging him to declare himself a Catholic; ‘Only so you can win Ireland,’ she said.

Yet the hope Scotland offered was of an uncertain nature, for the land and its people were divided and distracted. There were essentially three parties. All were prepared to set up Charles as king, but beyond that their aims were incompatible, and they were moreover riven by personal enmities and distrust.

Charles had to deal with three parties whose aims were inconsistent even while they proclaimed themselves ready to accept him as king: first, the zealots of the Covenant led by the Marquis of Argyll, who would accept Charles if he in turn would swear by the Solemn League and Covenant and undertake to establish Presbyterianism in England; second, the Engagers, led by John Maitland, Earl of Lauderdale, and Hamilton’s brother and heir, previously Earl of Lanark – the Engagement had split them from the rigid Covenanters, on account of their willingness to dilute the terms of the Solemn League; and third, the royalists, whose chief was Montrose, and who had realised that the Solemn League and Covenant was wrong in principle and futile as practical politics, since it was unacceptable to England and would make co-operation with English royalists impossible. This last party had sense on its side, and was the only one whose loyalty to the new King was unconditional. Unfortunately it was by far the weakest of the three in Scotland, where Montrose himself had been under sentence of death since his campaign in 1644–5 and was consequently, like his king, in exile.

Charles was inexperienced and beset by conflicting advice. Edward Hyde, for example, as one who knew the temper of England, was against any agreement with the Covenanters. Yet the young King was ready to negotiate with them all. This was foolish and dishonest, and he was to pay a terrible price for it. He would have done better to listen to his Aunt Elizabeth, whose judgement of Covenanters, Engagers and the schemers surrounding her nephew was that ‘they are all mad, or worse’.

Charles named Montrose captain-general of Scotland and authorised him to raise troops and make a landing in the north, even while he was negotiating with the Covenanters and preparing to submit to their demands. No doubt he hoped that Montrose would secure Scotland for him before he himself signed the detested Covenant, and regarded the negotiations with the Covenanters as an insurance policy if Montrose should fail. But he should have realised that the news of these negotiations, which obviously could not be kept secret, would render Montrose’s already difficult venture impossible. For why should men come out to fight alongside him when the King was known to be considering an agreement with the Marquis’s bitter and implacable enemies? Montrose’s chances had never been good; Charles’s trafficking with the Covenanters doomed his most loyal servant. He might as well have put the noose round Montrose’s neck with his own hands.

The Marquis sailed to Orkney, raised a sadly inadequate army, was defeated, betrayed, taken prisoner, carried to Edinburgh, and hanged. Meanwhile, before he learned of his captain-general’s fate, Charles promised to sign the Covenant as soon as he arrived in Scotland, allow the establishment of Presbyterianism in both his kingdoms, and enforce the Penal Laws against Roman Catholics. The promise made him miserable; even one of the Kirk ministers had second thoughts. Feeling sorry for ‘that poor young prince’, he thought he should not have been forced to sign the Covenant, ‘which we knew he hated in his heart’.
¹
It was too late, it seemed, to draw back. Charles wrote to Montrose telling him to lay down his arms, and apparently believed that he had secured from his new allies, who were really his captors, a promise of indemnity for the Marquis and other royalists. He was soon deceived. Before he sailed from Holland in the first week of June 1650, he received news of Montrose’s execution. ‘This is for Your Majesty’s service,’ he was smugly and dishonestly assured.
²
The months that followed were the bitterest of Charles’s life.

John Nicoll was an Edinburgh lawyer and something of a time-server, his opinions veering in accordance with the prevailing wind. This makes him, however, a useful barometer of opinion: ‘The news of his landing coming to the knowledge of the estates of Parliament, sitting here at Edinburgh, upon the 26th of June, late at night, all signs of joy were manifest through the whole kingdom; namely, and in a special manner, in Edinburgh by setting forth of bonfires, ringing of bells, sounding of trumpets, dancing almost all that night through the streets. The poor kail-wives at the Tron sacrificed their payments and baskets and the very stools they sat upon to the fire.’
³

At first all was hope. Though Charles would not be crowned for several months, a flavour of the Covenanters’ habit of mind may be caught by the account by the Reverend Robert Baillie of the eventual coronation:

This day we have done what I earnestly expected and long desired, crowned our noble King with all the solemnities at Scone, so peaceably and magnificently as if no enemy had been among us. This was of God; for it was Cromwell’s purpose, which I thought easily he might have performed, to have marred by arms that action, or at least the solemnity of it…Mr Douglas, from II Kings, XI, Joash’s coronation, had a very pertinent, wise and good sermon. The King swore the Coronation Oath; when Argyll put on the crown, Mr Robert Douglas prayed well; when the Chancellor set him in the throne, he exhorted well; when all were ended, he [Douglas] pressed sincerity and constancy in the Covenant on the King, dilating at length King James’s breach from the Covenant, pursued yet against the family, from Nehemiah v.13, God’s casting the King out of his lap, and the 34th of Jeremiah, many plagues on him if he does not keep the oaths now taken. He closed all with a prayer, and the 20th Psalm.
⁴

Baillie, it may be remarked, was one of the more liberal ministers, and one of the few inclined to be sympathetic to the young King.

Very soon after his arrival in Scotland, Charles had a taste of the humiliations in store for him. Most of the royalist friends who had accompanied him were dismissed, Buckingham and Henry Seymour the sole exceptions. Buckingham remained characteristically light-hearted. It didn’t matter what he signed, he told Charles; he could repudiate everything once he was king in fact as well as name. Meanwhile the King was afflicted by the ministers of the Kirk, who broke in upon him at all hours to lecture him on the duties of a covenanted king and the iniquity of his parents, his grandfather (James VI) and his Catholic ancestors. He had to attend church four times on Sundays and listen to long sermons couched in the vigorous and violent language of the Old Testament. Jehovah, the Lord of Hosts, was the Covenanters’ God; they cared little for Jesus and the Gospel message of forgiveness. ‘It was,’ Charles said later, ‘a miserable life. I saw no women, and the people were so ignorant that they thought it sinful to play the violin.’
⁵
‘Sinful’ was indeed the ministers’ favourite word.

All this might be borne, and Charles did indeed bear it with admirable self-control, swallowing insults and sharp criticism. More worrying was the way in which the bigoted intolerance of those now around him narrowed the base of support for the war against Cromwell, which must be won if he was to be restored in both his kingdoms. It was no national movement he nominally led. The true royalists, all those who had been associated with Montrose, were anathema. Even the Engagers were spurned, and Lauderdale and the new Duke of Hamilton dismissed; they had compromised the Covenant, were lukewarm, and so the true Covenanters spewed them, like the Laodiceans of the Book of Revelation, out of their mouths. (Even so, some of the Covenanting zealots in the western counties would have nothing to do with this dubiously Covenanted king.)

The most important man in Scotland was not the King, but Argyll. Archibald Campbell, eighth Earl and first Marquis, was in his way as remarkable a man as his great antagonist Montrose. Chief of the powerful Clan Campbell, he was a Douglas on his mother’s side, and, through the Douglases, as he liked to remind people, eighth in succession from Robert the Bruce himself. His wayward father, with whom he had been at odds, had converted to Catholicism, and encumbered his estates with debt. So, as a young man, Archibald was principally concerned with getting his lands in order and repairing his financial position. Then, during the momentous General Assembly of the Kirk at Glasgow in 1638, he had experienced a religious awakening. In modern terms he was ‘born again’, from that day on committed to the Covenant and to the establishment of a theocracy, guided however by the wisdom of godly nobles, of whom he was chief. His political course was erratic, his aim constant. He had assured Cromwell he would prevent Charles from coming to Scotland, then engineered his arrival. Unprepossessing in appearance, slight, dark, thin-lipped and with a cast or squint in his left eye, Argyll was also notably intelligent and capable of exercising considerable charm. Charles soon found him the one man among the Covenanters with whom he could converse agreeably. Nevertheless, he didn’t trust him.

In August Cromwell marched north with his veteran army, accustomed to victory, to suppress the insubordinate Scots. Charles, though a proclaimed, if not yet crowned, king, was forbidden to join the army. Instead the ministers urged the necessity of purging it of ‘malignants’, for the Almighty was offended by their presence among the troops. A hundred officers and three thousand men were dismissed. Either the sacrifice was insufficient or they had misread their divinity’s mind, for the battle that followed at Dunbar was disastrous. The ministers themselves were at fault. The Scots army had been drawn up in a good position on a commanding height. Meanwhile Cromwell, outmanoeuvred, was in sore straits, supplies running out. The Scots had only to exercise patience, to adopt the traditional course of refusing battle till the English invaders were further weakened. Instead the ministers commanded that they should advance and ‘smite the Amalekites’. This was a mistake, and the battle was lost. Cromwell moved to occupy Edinburgh.