The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (35 page)

It was now proposed to raise a new army, including Engagers and any royalists who would, like the King, accept the Covenant. Argyll was alarmed. ‘You have done wickedly,’ he told the King, ‘in admitting malignants.’ ‘I know not what you mean by malignants,’ Charles replied. ‘We are all malignants to God.’
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Preparations for the coronation continued. Argyll sought to bind the King more tightly. ‘I cannot serve Your Majesty as you desire,’ he said, ‘unless you give some undeniable proof of a fixed resolution to support the Presbyterian party – which I think would best be done by marrying into some family of quality that is known to be entirely attached to your interest. This would take off the prejudice upon your mother.’
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The bride he had in mind was his own daughter, Lady Anne Campbell. Charles asked for time, and spoke of the need to get his mother’s approval. He was becoming adept in the art of prevarication. The young man who had seen off La Grande Mademoiselle was not going to be hooked by Lady Anne. He would play the bitter comedy to the end.

At last he was crowned, on New Year’s Day 1651, after a prayer that the Crown should be ‘delivered from the sins and transgressions of those preceding His Majesty King Charles II’. At the subsequent banquet, Charles expressed ‘much joy in that I am the first Covenanted King of Scotland’. He kept a straight face, and a few days later, at Stirling, consented to pray with Argyll for several hours. Both wept. Argyll was overcome by the high emotion of the night. His wife told him the King had shed only ‘crocodile tears’. ‘This night,’ she added, ‘will cost you your life.’
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At the price of humiliation, deceit and hours of boredom, Charles had achieved his first aim: to be a crowned king. He now proceeded to gather a new army, from which no faction would be excluded; and the Kirk, weakened by the disaster of Dunbar, was unable to prevent him from doing so. Eight months later, in August, he crossed the border at the head of eight thousand foot, two thousand horse and with a small train of rather outdated artillery. He looked to English royalists to rise in support, but the news that he had signed the detestable Covenant and promised to impose Presbyterianism on England – a betrayal of his martyred father – deterred them. They had not yet learned that the son was of a different temper and that his word was not to be relied on. Scotland had taught him hypocrisy; he had learned the lesson well, and never forgot it. Privately, he had already concluded that Presbyterianism was ‘no religion for a gentleman’, one indeed that he absolutely detested.

The army marched south. David Leslie, general-in-chief, grew more despondent with every mile they travelled into England. He knew too well the quality of Cromwell’s men to entertain optimism. When Charles asked him why he seemed so melancholy, he replied that, no matter how well their army looked, it would not fight. He was wrong there. When Cromwell trapped them in Worcester, and they tried to break out, many of the royalists fought with the greatest courage. Charles put himself in the vanguard – as his cousin Rupert had been accustomed to do – and had two horses killed under him. But Leslie was not quite mistaken: his own cavalry took no part in the action. Some have seen treachery in this, even evidence of an understanding with the absent Argyll. The charge is improbable. Leslie was more anxious to get his men safely back to Scotland. In any case, if he had indeed betrayed Charles, he was ill rewarded, for Cromwell clapped him into the Tower of London, where he remained till the Restoration. Charles himself did not regard Leslie as a traitor; he gave him a peerage in 1660, while Argyll was executed, ostensibly for collaborating with Cromwell.

Worcester was fought on 3 September 1651. Cromwell called it his ‘crowning mercy’; the King’s cause lay trampled in the bloodstained dust. Charles was all for fighting to the last. When Buckingham and his gentleman of the bedchamber, Henry Wilmot, who had fought on the royalist side throughout the civil war and would prove himself Charles’s most steadfast friend, urged him to escape, he cried out that he would rather be shot. But either their arguments prevailed, or they succeeded in leading him away from the lost battle.

The next six weeks were the most extraordinary, the most dangerous, the most dramatic, and yet also, in memory at least, the most exhilarating of Charles’s life. He was a fugitive, with a price of £1,000 on his head. His wanderings took him over the west Midlands and the south of England. Everywhere he found loyalists ready to risk their lives to protect him and set him on the next stage of his journey. Many were Catholics, and if, in later life, Charles was indeed drawn to Rome, it may partly have been because of the memory of how so many abused, marginalised and persecuted adherents of the proscribed faith had ventured all to see him to safety. He travelled disguised, now, his face and hands stained with walnut juice, as a woodcutter (though he could not master the local accent and was advised to keep quiet – difficult for so talkative a man); now as a groom riding behind the daughter of his supposed employer.

Everywhere there was danger. He had to trust people he had never met before, any of whom, for all he could know, might be tempted by the reward offered, or, if arrested, betray him under torture or its threat. The government proclamation was widely circulated: ‘Take notice of Charles Stuart to be a tall man above two yards high, his hair a deep brown near to black, and has been cut off. Expect him under disguise.’ That disguise was not easy. Charles, with his height – six foot two inches – his swarthy complexion, inherited from his Medici ancestors, and his grace of manner, did not look like an English countryman. He found difficulty too in walking like a peasant or woodman. He was recognised several times, once by the butler in a house where he lodged; the man, by name Pope, had been falconer to a Cavalier gentleman. A Mrs Hyde, widow to a cousin of his chancellor, knew him straight away, though she had seen him only once when he was still a boy. But nobody betrayed him. One of his early rescuers, Francis Yates, was hanged for refusing to give any information as to where the King had gone or might be found. Yates was brother-in-law to Richard Penderel, whose Catholic family ran terrible risks to save Charles. ‘If I ever come into my kingdom,’ he said to them, ‘I will remember you.’
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Charles, a man who broke promises as easily as he gave them, did not break this one. Very soon after the Restoration, the whole Penderel family were invited to Whitehall, received pensions, and heard the story of his adventures after they had parted from him.

There were several narrow escapes. He spent one day concealed in an oak tree, while Roundhead soldiers searched the woods below him. On another occasion, near Stratford-upon-Avon, while he was riding behind Jane Lane as her groom, they took a roundabout route to avoid a troop of Cromwell’s horse, only to find them already in the town. Humour was not always missing from the tales the King would tell of his escape. When his horse cast a shoe and he asked the smith ‘What news?’ the reply came: ‘None that I know of since the good news of the beating of the rogue Scots.’ ‘Are none of the English taken, that joined with them?’ Charles asked. ‘I did not hear that the rogue Charles Stuart was taken – some of the others, but not Charles Stuart.’ ‘If that rogue were taken,’ the King said, ‘he deserves to be hanged more than all the rest, for bringing in the Scots.’ ‘You speak like an honest man,’ the smith said, holding out his hand. On another occasion a drunken Cavalier squire took Charles for a Roundhead, and pressed drink on him, swearing lustily when the King was reluctant to match him glass for glass. Charles held up his hand, and imitating the characteristic Puritan whine said, ‘O, dear brother. Swear not, I beseech you.’

He journeyed now with one companion, now with another, sometimes joined by Wilmot and sometimes without him when he had gone ahead to seek information. From Worcester he had gone north by way of Kidderminster and Stourbridge, hoping and failing to cross the Severn into royalist Wales. They had then doubled back to Stratford, then south by Cirencester to near Bristol, where they hoped to find a ship, then by way of Castle Cary to Bridport on the same quest. Unsuccessful there, the King was compelled to lie up for twelve days at Trent House, the property of Sir Francis Wyndham. Thence they made their way east, pausing at Stonehenge (where Charles disproved the popular notion that you could not count the stones twice and arrive at the same total) before at last arriving at Brighton, where they learned of a ship berthed at Shoreham chartered by a merchant ready to carry the King to safety. The merchant, Francis Mansell, brought the ship’s captain to the inn where they had put up. After they had eaten, the captain, Tattersall, told Mansell he had not dealt fairly with him: ‘That is the King. I know him very well.’ Mansell denied it, but Tattersall was not convinced. Again he said, to Charles when he boarded the vessel, ‘I know Your Majesty very well.’ The innkeeper had recognised him also; he proved to have been one of Charles I’s household servants. At five o’clock the following morning, 15 October, the King and Wilmot were put ashore at Fecamp on the coast of Normandy. Captain Gunter, the Sussex landowner who had secured Mansell’s services and escorted the King to the harbour, was riding home at around the same hour when he was stopped by a troop of Roundhead horse, searching for ‘a tall black man, six foot two inches high’.

A few days later Charles arrived in Paris and had to borrow a clean shirt. His mother was delighted to see him safe, but told him he would have to pay for his own dinner, since she couldn’t afford to do so.

His weeks on the run provided him with a story that he would tell, again and again, for the rest of his life. It fascinated those who heard it for the first time. On the ship bringing Charles back to England in 1660 the young Samuel Pepys was enthralled when granted the privilege of hearing of the King’s adventures. Twenty years later he recorded the story again at Charles’s dictation. Those closer to the King soon found the repetition of the narrative to be an appalling bore. But at first everyone was astonished that a king should have had to undergo such experiences. In conversation with Hyde, however, Charles did not conceal that he had sometimes come close to despair. ‘I thought that I was paying too high a price for my life.’ He added that he owed most to the persecuted Catholics, without whose help he must surely have been taken.
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The years that followed were often wretched, full of disappointments. Charles was impoverished, living from hand to mouth, surrounded by men who were themselves frequently lonely, disgruntled and quarrelsome. Projects for royalist risings were brought before him. He encouraged few of them, knowing how little chance they had of success. He watched Cromwell win the respect of European monarchs while he himself was disregarded or insulted, at best employed as an expendable pawn on the diplomatic chessboard. According to the moves of that game, he was at various times made to realise he was unwelcome in France and the Netherlands, and compelled to move on. Cromwell’s spies infiltrated his household. Some of his followers made their peace with the dictator. Buckingham, for instance, contrived to return safely to England, where he married Fairfax’s daughter, lived off his father-in-law, and posed as a reformed and pious character, acquiring merit among the Independents. To please his new friends, he would say that Charles had shown himself a coward at Worcester. All this came to Charles’s ears and was bitter to hear. Nevertheless, he would forgive the Duke; he wasn’t a man with whom Charles could ever be angry for long. Sooner or later Buckingham would jest himself back into favour.

The King’s character was formed in these years of exile – more accurately, it was deformed. The blithe and affectionate boy became a hardened cynic, taking pleasure where he might find it. Women came easily to him, and he took them as he found them, but none since Lucy Walter captured his heart. The bitterness with which he pursued her in his attempt to get possession of their son was unlike his behaviour to any other of the many women in his life; evidence that she alone had the ability to hurt him, that perhaps she was the only one he ever truly loved. Now, in his cynical disillusion, masked only by perfect manners, he reserved his affection for the children in the family – his son James, Harry of Gloucester, Minette, William the little Prince of Orange – and his spaniels. None of them plagued him with impossible demands or presented him with impractical plans; none had let him down.

Cromwell died in September 1658. (At the French court La Grande Mademoiselle was the only person to refuse to wear mourning in honour of the dictator.) There was great excitement among the royalists, but this soon died down and was replaced by frustration, for Richard Cromwell took his father’s place as Lord Protector. Richard, however, was in office, but not in power. The army had no respect for him, and he soon gave way and retired into private life. The remnant of the old 1640 Parliament, the Rump, was recalled, amidst general derision, expressed in London by a craze for roasting the rumps of cattle, sheep and pigs. General Monk, who had himself been a Cavalier before he was a Roundhead, marched his army from Scotland, and, after much hesitation and sounding of opinion, summoned what was known as a free parliament, elected by the traditional constituencies. By now it was evident in which direction the tide was running, and the parliament, at Monk’s request, appointed commissioners to go to the Netherlands and bring the King back. Charles meanwhile had issued a declaration, drawn up by Hyde, in which he promised to defend the Protestant religion. There should be ‘liberty of conscience, and a free and general pardon for political offences’.

In these weeks before the offer of restoration was made, Charles had maintained an appearance of impassivity. It was as if he dared not trust his luck. But at last all was confirmed. General Monk had declared for him; so had Parliament and so had the navy, whose commander, Montagu (later Earl of Sandwich), was deputed to bring him home. So rapid had been the transformation that the ship in which Montagu sailed was still called the
Naseby
; it would soon be renamed the
Royal Charles
. Once aboard, the King became animated. He could not keep still but walked the deck and talked and talked. (It was now that he told Pepys the story of his adventures after Worcester.)