A History of Britain, Volume 2 (23 page)

Ralph Verney's life also changed in 1647–8 as dramatically and as painfully as the condition of England. Although he had never been a royalist, his flight and continued absence in Blois had made him officially a ‘delinquent', subject to the sequestration of his estates. In 1647, after much
deliberation, he sent his capable wife Mary back to England to see if something could be done to recover them. He had hoped to use his connection with Lady Sussex, who had waxed so considerate at the time of his father's death, to advance his cause but she was now on her next aged husband, who turned out to be none other than the Puritan Earl of Warwick. Faced with the embarrassing reminder of her past in the shape of Mary Verney, Lady Warwick became suddenly hard of hearing to her propositions. Mary none the less persevered with the county committee and eventually ‘Old Men's Wife', as Ralph and Mary called her in their private code, did her bit. In January 1648 the sequestration was lifted. But Mary paid a terrible price for her tireless efforts. Claydon itself, when she finally got to it, was miraculously still standing, though it had been used as a barracks for soldiers, and the rats and moths had munched their way through much of the furniture and hangings, especially, to Ralph's distress, the ‘Turkie Worke' rugs. But their house's dilapidation was nothing compared to the personal tragedy that followed. Pregnant throughout her lobbying campaigns, Mary was finally delivered of a boy, whom she christened Ralph, only for him to die while still an infant. The same week she heard from her husband that their little daughter Peg had died as well. Ralph, though full of grief, wrote to his distraught wife bravely, in the stoical Christian manner: 'Tis true they are taken from us, (and thats theire happinesse); but wee shall goe to them, (and that should bee our comfort). And is it not much the better both for us and them, that wee should rather assend to heaven to partake of theire perpetuall blisse, than they descend to Earth to share with us our misfortunes?' But he was, in fact, unhinged by sorrow and told his nephew Dr Denton that he would leave France and travel somewhere – Italy or the ‘barbary desert' where he could seek out his death. Once gone, he thought his widow and their remaining children would be free to start a new life unencumbered by the taint of his political past. The rescue of his estate, though, thanks to Mary, lifted his spirits out of the slough of despond, and after all their troubles the couple were reunited in Paris in the spring of 1648. They had two more years together in France before Mary's death from a lung disease. It was still not safe for Ralph to return, and he was obliged to ship her body back to Buckinghamshire in its coffin where it was buried before a little company of friends in Middle Claydon church.

An endgame began. In November 1647 Charles had escaped the custody of the New Model Army, but only as far as the Isle of Wight, where he was swiftly shut up in Carisbrooke Castle. It was, none the less, a kind of political liberty, since he was still allowed to entertain offers for his endorsement from the lowest bidder. They now included the Scots –
not, of course, the purest of the Covenanters (who were appalled by the overture) but a critical element of the less zealous nobles, fearful that the formidable English army, which had neutered parliament, would target them next. A Scotland subjected to the New Model Army would be a Scotland in which a bedlam of sects would be unloosed. It was not to be thought of. The Scots also knew that in his troubles Charles was more popular than he had ever been at the height of his powers. So they came to the Isle of Wight and made him the best offer yet: a Presbyterian settlement for just three years in the first instance and a voluntary acknowledgement of the Covenant. Under the terms of this ‘Engagement' (seen also as a way to end the Scottish civil war), the Scots army, together with a newly raised royalist army from northern England, would, if necessary, impose the settlement by force.

Charles, the Duke of Hamilton and royalist stalwarts like Sir Marmaduke Langdale, who had somehow survived Marston Moor and Naseby, could only imagine that they might well reverse the outcome of the first civil war, because since December 1647 whole regions of southern England and Wales had risen in revolt. Unfortunately, for those who wanted to turn a rebellion into a cohesive army, the cause for which they were in insurrection was not Charles (though he was extremely popular) but Father Christmas. Maypoles and the celebration of St George's Day and, of course, Charles's accession day, along with other heathen and seditious revels, had already been outlawed by the Presbyterian parliament. But Christmas – the longest festive celebration and the one arguably that everyone needed at the darkest time of year – was the major target for those bent on cleaning up the calendar and making the Lord's Sabbath on Sunday the only day of rest, and 5 November, the festival of redemption from papist despotism, the only permissible celebration. But to force shopkeepers to keep their businesses open on Christmas Day was hard work for the constabulary, who were already busy ripping down the holly and ivy in towns like Bury St Edmunds and Ipswich, where the citizens festooned the streets in deliberate defiance. The greatest Christmas riots occurred in Kent and rapidly swelled into an all-out armed rebellion. The insurrection was bloodily put down, but 3000 of the rebels escaped over the Thames to Essex, where they held out against Fairfax for months on end behind the great Roman walls of Colchester.

The only real chance of a serious royalist revival, though, depended on the rest of Britain. And in the summer of 1648, the rest of Britain failed Charles. A rebellion in south and central Wales was smashed, leaving Cromwell to besiege Chepstow and Pembroke and mop up the resistance. While relatively charitable terms had previously been offered
to those surrendering to besiegers, this second round of war had made iron enter Cromwell's soul, and he often let his soldiers do their worst. Having cleaned up Wales like some latter-day Edward I, he turned to the Scots and between 17 and 19 August 1648 annihilated them first at Preston and then at Winwick.

Although parliament in the spring of 1648 had passed a resolution continuing to declare that the government of England should still consist of king, lords and commons, Cromwell, and more particularly his increasingly militant son-in-law Henry Ireton, no longer really thought so. After the first civil war they had been prepared to buy into the fiction that Charles had been misled by ‘men of blood'. And many of those surviving culprits were summarily tried and executed. But now there was nowhere else for blame to go. The chief sanguinary was Charles Stuart himself. In the previous year, the Leveller
Agreement of the People
had already spelled out the unmentionable: a kingless, bishopless Britain. As a demand from the army's rank and file it was not to be tolerated by such as Ireton, but now in the bitter aftermath of the second civil war they sought to make it their own. They had not come to this conclusion in any delirium of constitutional experiment, but rather with the intense pessimism with which parliament itself had concluded that Strafford had to go for ‘reasons of the security of state'. If anything, Strafford had been much more blameless than Charles I. Ireton reasoned now that Charles's escape and the second civil war, not to mention the still unsubdued Irish Confederacy, ruled out ever considering another negotiated treaty with the king. He would never abide in good faith by its terms, nor fail to be a magnet for the disaffected, especially in such difficult times of soaring prices and plague. And perhaps more decisive than all of this, at least for Oliver Cromwell, was his infuriated conviction that Charles had defied the judgement of Providence, so clearly declared at Marston Moor and Naseby. Perhaps then (Cromwell still could not quite bring himself to this) the monarchy had to go. Whether Charles had to die was quite another matter. What, after all, was the point, when a whole club of healthy little Stuarts were standing in line in France and Holland as potential successors?

It was when the parliamentary Presbyterians realized that the trial of the king was now a distinct possibility that they hastened to pre-empt it. In September 1648 a deputation went to Newport on the Isle of Wight to talk to the king one last time. But Charles was himself now lost to a peculiar euphoria, both wily and holy. One day he would imagine that he could continue to exploit the deep differences between parliament and army, that one or the other would
need
him to prevail. And on the next
day he would meditate on his coming martyrdom. His grandmother had felt and behaved in precisely the same way at Fotheringhay. But if Mary had been certain of her martyrdom, she died not quite knowing where the allegiance of her son James stood. Charles, on the other hand, had no such anxiety about the Prince of Wales. All those Van Dyck family portraits, it turned out, were in their way no more than the truth. The Stuarts were, whatever their many other character failings, a loving and loyal family. So Charles was increasingly prepared, even eager, to deliver himself to his fate, convinced that his death would wipe clean his transgressions and follies, excite popular revulsion and guarantee the throne for his son. ‘The English nation are a sober people,' he wrote to the Prince of Wales, ‘however at present under some infatuation.' He was sure that sooner or later they would recover from this unfortunate delirium. So why should he have any interest in baling out the Presbyterians by agreeing to terms that he had already turned down? He might even have privately enjoyed their transparent desperation.

On 16 November 1648 Fairfax, who had failed to persuade the king to sign a version of the army's ‘Heads of the Proposals', was now more or less compelled to agree to a ferocious ‘Remonstrance', largely written by Henry Ireton. It demanded the trial of the king and the abolition of the monarchy. But none of this, by now, could have been much of a shock to Charles. At his most apparently impotent, there was a weird sense in which Charles was at last in control, if not of his immediate destiny, then of his posterity. His worst moment became his best moment, his execution his vindication. He must have taken satisfaction from the knowledge that everything that would be done to him could only be done by making a nonsense of the principles for which parliament had claimed to go to war: the protection of the liberties of the subject. It was but a small step now for Charles Stuart to claim that, all along,
he
and not they had been the shield of his subjects, the defender of the people.

And so it fell out. When Colonel Thomas Pride stood at the door of the Commons on 6 December with his sword-carrying heavies, stopping members who had voted for the Newport Treaty from entering and arresting others, he was violating precisely the parliamentary independence that the war had been fought to preserve. The truncated ‘Rump' Parliament that resulted was more a mockery of the institution than anything the Stuarts had ever convened or dissolved. Of the original stalwart tribunes of the Long Parliament, only Oliver St John and Henry Vane the younger embraced the military
coup d'état
with any enthusiasm. The ‘high court', packed and processed into compliance by manager Ireton, was more farcically arbitrary than any of the prerogative courts that the Long
Parliament had abolished as the tools of despotism. It seems that Cromwell was, for a long time, painfully aware of these transparent manipulations of legality and deeply troubled by the prospect of a trial. As late as December 1648 he still referred to those who had ‘carried on a design' to depose Charles as traitors. But at some point over the next few weeks he had decided that Providence was, after all, unmistakably demanding the punishment of the ‘man of blood', the ‘author' of the civil woes. A special high court of 135 commissioners was hand-picked, with a great deal of trouble taken to include a cross-section of the English notability – landowners, army officers and MPs. One commissioner who absented himself from the proceedings was Fairfax. When his name was called at the very beginning of the roll, it was answered by Lady Fairfax, sitting veiled in the public gallery: ‘No, nor will he be here; he has more wit than to be here.' Oliver St John likewise decided against making an appearance. Certain precautions had to be taken. The presiding judge, John Bradshaw, wore a hat with a special metal lining ‘to ward off blows', and the prisoner was kept well away from the public galleries.

Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the history of the previous century might have known that it was a bad idea to put members of the house of Stuart on trial. Exacting and nimble displays of legal punctiliousness, followed by a dignified preparation for martyrdom, were their forte. Charles had been brought from Windsor to Westminster, where he dined and lodged as ‘Charles Stuart', without any of the service and courtesies due to a sovereign. It was as though legally he were dead already. But there were formalities to go through. On 20 January, beneath Richard II's great hammerbeam roof in Westminster Hall, the short figure in the black hat and grey beard, his face drawn and haggard, was told by the lawyer John Cook that he was being arraigned for his chief and prime responsibility for ‘all the treasons, murders, ravages, burnings, spoils, desolations, damages and mischiefs to this nation'. Asked to plead, he refused, demanding instead to know by ‘what power I am called hither . . . I would know by what Authority, I mean, lawful; [for] there are many unlawful Authorities in the world, Theeves and Robbers by the high ways . . . Remember I am your King, your lawful King, and what sins you bring on your heads, and the Judgement of God upon this Land, think well upon it . . . before you go further from one sin to a greater.'

Denying the court its show trial, complete with witnesses, Charles, without his habitual stammer, reiterated his refusal to acknowledge the competence of its jurisdiction. When he reappeared on 22 January he was hoping to read the text of a written explanation of his reasons for refusing to plead, insisting that as king he could not be held accountable to any
earthly judges and that nothing lawful could possibly be derived from a body that had removed one part of its indivisible law-making sovereignty. The only possible claim to such jurisdiction was through the revolutionary utterance, already made by the Rump Parliament when it asserted on 4 January that ‘the people are, under God, the source of all just power'. Charles, not hesitating to expose the coercion behind the fig leaf, protested that it was common knowledge that this parliament's claim to represent the people was belied by the detention and exclusion of many of its representatives. Here was Charles Stuart in effect making the claim that he, and not the army or a fraudulent parliament, was the true guardian of the welfare and freedom of the people. That, of course, was what his most articulate and disinterested champions, like Edward Hyde, had wanted him to say all along. Needless to say, the impresarios of the trial were not going to allow Charles to say these things out loud. He was silenced before getting very far with his statement and after much protest taken away from the court. The following day the same exchange ended when Bradshaw admonished Charles that he was ‘notwithstanding you will not understand it . . . before a Court of Justice'.