King Charles II (13 page)

In the south, Charles, at the head of his newly acquired fleet, showed resolution and courage. It was born of a surge of new Royalist optimism, since he was in no position to appreciate how disastrously the northern situation was deteriorating. He tried first to save Colchester, which was being besieged by Fairfax. Then he sailed for the Downs, seizing a number of merchant ships on the way and exacting a useful ransom of £20,000 from the Common Council. Next he set up a blockade at the mouth of the Thames, penning in the Earl of Warwick and the rest of the Parliamentary fleet. Here another important
ship absconded to his side; now in command of a fleet of eleven ships, carrying a total of nearly three hundred guns, Charles felt sufficiently confident to write to the House of Lords on behalf of his father.

It was certainly in Charles’ mind that he might soon be in a position to rescue the King, still in his Isle of Wight fastness, if this naval superiority was maintained.

At this point the Scots reminded Charles strongly of their prior strategic claims. On 10 August an emissary from the Committee of the Estates, in the shape of the Earl of Lauderdale, arrived in order to persuade Charles to fulfil his promise and join them. Yet, even at this stage, both sides continued to argue out the points of dispute – mainly religious – between them. The Prince was informed in unvarnished terms that certain members of his train, such as Prince Rupert, the Marquess of Montrose and Lord Digby, would not be welcome among the Scots. And there was no question of the Prince being accompanied by his own Anglican (non-Covenanting) chaplains. The Prince must also promise to use the Presbyterian form of service.

It is true that the Prince and Lauderdale did establish a good personal relationship. This Lauderdale, a man of thirty, must be distinguished from the infinitely grosser and less attractive post-Restoration statesman he subsequently became. He was odd-looking, with a mass of uncouth red hair hanging down on either side of his face, but he was acute and quick-witted, despite his barbaric appearance. Nevertheless, for all his Caliban quality, Lauderdale would go down in history as the only Scot Charles actually liked. As for Lauderdale himself, from the first he formed ‘a great opinion’ of the Prince’s ‘power’ – ‘We are like to be very happy with him,’ he wrote.
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For all this amity, no immediate resolution of the problem of the Covenant versus the Royal Anglican position was found.

Neither the Prince nor Lauderdale were aware that as these discussions on the finer points of Presbyterianism raged, General Cromwell was sweeping down on the hapless Scots. They had reached Lancashire; he approached them across the Pennines. It was a dramatic tactical manœuvre, the finest of Cromwell’s career. It met its reward at the Battle of Preston on 17 August,
at which Cromwell defeated the numerically far superior Royalists by pouncing on them from the rear.

Only the day before, Lauderdale had been finally called into the Prince’s Council and told that his conditions would be accepted. It did not help that the scene in which concessions – too late – were made to the Scots was extremely unpleasantly handled. Prince Rupert, who was about to be excluded, found himself sitting next to Lauderdale, who was successfully demanding that exclusion.

The sacrifice and the humiliation were in vain. A few days later the news of the disastrous defeat at Preston made it clear that the Second Civil War was in effect at an end. And with it had perished the Engagers’ authority in Scotland. It was now Lauderdale who was unable to return to a Scotland newly dominated by the Kirk, the Covenanters, and ‘gley-eyed’ (squinting) Argyll – all those uncontaminated by the recent débâcle.

The whole incident left a bitter taste behind it. Each party, Royalists and Scots, could argue that they had been let down by the other. This sour sediment was not a good omen for any future co-operation between them.

‘Almighty God, who do’st establish thrones of Princes, and the succession in those thrones, by giving thy judgements to the King, and thy righteousness to the King’s Son …’

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n the light of the Scottish defeat at Preston, the immediate instinct of the Prince of Wales was to head back for Holland. There counsel could be taken, this new situation assessed and a new strategy devised. There was obviously no future in hanging about the shores of England. The Engagers were in total disarray. Nothing could be expected from the Covenanting Scots.

But Charles reckoned without his surly navy.

Seeing no reason whatsoever to depart without the fun of a fight, they crowded on deck of the royal ship and threatened to throw Lauderdale and John Colepeper overboard. It was their belief – quite unfounded – that this little clique intended to take the Prince away from them in a single ship. The only person they would heed was their Prince himself. Charles rose to the occasion. After a great deal of pacification at his hands – or the ‘so kind words’, as they were afterwards described – the sailors finally agreed to return to Holland.

Or so it was believed on the Prince’s ship. In fact, two of the largest vessels continued to ignore orders and sailed defiantly in the direction of Lord Warwick and the Parliamentary Navy. This was an age when there were new chords of disobedience to be heard, amidst the general music of strife and war. It was
a phenomenon from which neither side was immune. The year before, the ranks of the Parliamentary Army had threatened their officers in a bellicose manner; in 1649 the Levellers in the Burford mutiny would challenge the authority of Cromwell himself.

The royal ship was compelled to give chase to the deviants and an absurd and unnecessary engagement took place. The action would have been farcical if men’s lives had not been at stake. Before the battle was joined the rival royal commanders, Sir William Batten and Prince Rupert, were already yapping at each other like jealous dogs. When Batten wiped the sweat off the back of his neck with a napkin Rupert took it as a signal to the enemy and threatened to shoot Batten for treachery if they were defeated.

The only person who continued to behave with calm and courage, as he had done throughout this long and trying summer, was Prince Charles. He refused to go below decks to protect himself, just as he had tried to remain on the scene of battle at Edgehill. This time he had his way. He told his attendant lords very firmly that dishonour meant more to him than his safety, and stayed on deck.

The sailors’ action was particularly ill-advised since they had hardly any water aboard. In the end it was a propitious storm which saved them from the consequences of their rashness by deflecting the Parliamentary Navy from their challenge. And on 3 September, when there was a possibility of an encounter with Warwick’s ships, they were saved by the determination of the Dutch States-General to remain neutral. The Dutch Admiral Tromp was ordered to station himself between the Royal Tweedledee and the Parliamentary Tweedledum.

So Charles returned at last to Holland.

For the next six months he was, with his brother James, more or less dependent on the personal charity of the Prince of Orange, the Dutch States-General having declined to provide further financial assistance for the crippled English Royalist cause. It was a curious time in Charles’ life, during which cares were not unalleviated by pleasures. Like the phoney war which preceded the bombing of London at the beginning of the
Second World War, it was in some ways a period of calm and even relaxation, a prelude to, rather than a foretaste of, the searing experiences to follow.

The Hague itself was not a bad place in which to take up residence. It was cut off from the inhospitable North Sea by a stretch of dunes and had been designated the seat of the States-General, and of the provincial body, the States of Holland, at the end of the sixteenth century. When Prince Maurice of Nassau settled there in 1618 it became the royal residence as well. The cultural life of The Hague flourished. Not only literature, philosophy and the arts, but that inevitable seventeenth-century offshoot, theology, were part of the general cultural air of the city. While Amsterdam remained the commercial capital, bolstered up by the prosperity brought by commerce and industry, the lifeblood of the Dutch people – painters, philosophers and theologians – enjoyed the free and argumentative atmosphere of The Hague.

It was a time of development for Charles personally. At least he was free of his mother’s apron strings. With James to care for, he moved to a position as head of the family – those members of it who were at liberty. Then there was his relationship with his sister Mary. It had to be faced that Mary, the pretty, ringleted child of Van Dyck’s pictures, had not grown up into a particularly agreeable young woman. Marriage before she was ready for it and a troublesome mother-in-law – Amalia von Solms was fearfully strong-minded – had combined to inspire in Mary an undiplomatic dislike of her adopted country.

Poor Mary had inherited the tactlessness of both her parents. She refused to learn Dutch, hardly the mark of an amiable spouse, and made it clear that, in her eyes, France was preferable to Holland. As a result, she has been harshly treated by Dutch historians. Correctly, they have drawn attention to her deficiencies as Dutch consort. It is true that circumstances might explain the emergence of this outwardly chilly figure, indifferent to the susceptibilities of her adopted people. Princesses in those days however were not expected to undergo psychological difficulties. At least the English should regard her with more sympathy, since the consequence of all this was a true devotion
to her brother Charles, both to his person and to his interests.

Nonetheless, it was distressing that the one member of his family in a position to aid Charles practically at this juncture was a square peg in a round hole. As it was, Charles found himself covering up for Mary, atoning for her unfortunate hauteur with his own civility. The Prince of Orange himself was a decent fellow who took his responsibilities to his in-laws seriously, not merely because it would suit him to have his wife’s father back on the throne of England. After William
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’s premature death in 1650, Mary’s lack of judgement – like that of her mother, similarly placed – grew worse, and her determination to aid Charles ostentatiously, at the expense of Holland, more pronounced. Once again it was Charles who indulged in graceful little gestures, such as addressing the Elector of Brandenburg as ‘brother’ (indicating an imaginary equality of rank between them, as opposed to the correct salutation of ‘cousin’).
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His sister, on the other hand, did not care to study the art of how to please.

In general, Mary placed a quite pathetic reliance on her status as an English princess. It gave her a much needed sense of security to meditate on her royal rank: but that again was somewhat tactless in view of the fallen fortunes of the house of Stuart and their reliance on the good will of other European rulers, whether of equal status or not. Determined to emphasize that she remained the daughter of a king, Mary complained loudly that she ought to continue to take precedence over her sister-in-law Louise Henrietta of Orange when she married the Elector of Brandenburg. Mary’s case was weak because the Elector was a supreme ruler, whereas the Prince of Orange was not. The new Electress should really have preceded her.

In the autumn of 1648 however the devotion of Mary helped to support Charles’ growing feeling of authority in the family. This family was in the process of being extended, on one side of the blanket at least, by the pregnancy of Charles’ mistress Lucy Walter. The character of this straightforward young lady later became surrounded by myths. The truth about Lucy, ‘brown, beautiful and bold’, as John Evelyn called her, was that she was neither a whore, as one legend suggests, nor the chosen
bride of the Prince of Wales. She was not even of low birth, as Monmouth’s enemies would declare in later years, in order to taunt him with the fact that other royal bastards – the son of Louise de Kéroüalle for example – were of superior antecedents on their mother’s side. Lucy Walter’s own mother was a niece of the Earl of Carbery; she herself came of a perfectly respectable Welsh family, hence her appealing, dark-eyed Celtic looks.
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Lucy Walter was not a whore. But she did belong to that restless and inevitably light-moralled generations of young ladies who grew up in the untrammelled times of the Civil War. Barbara Villiers, a far more celebrated mistress of Charles
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, was another such. As their brothers, who had grown up frequently without fathers, became the undisciplined high-spirited bucks of the 1660s, so those young ladies who survived to the merrier times of the Restoration became the great ladies of the Court. But Evelyn added that Lucy Walter was ‘insipid’. Perhaps he implied a lack of a survivor’s instinct. For Lucy Walter died in 1658, to be buried in an unnamed grave in Paris. It thus became fashionable to blacken her birth as well as her character.