Authors: Antonia Fraser
The appointment of the Earl of Glencairn to a temporary overall command in the summer of 1653 was not such a wise move on the part of the King. He had once more straddled the Scots with a divided authority: the last thing they needed, in view of their own natural differences. Glencairn, unlike Middleton, was at the King’s side. There was the renewed question of a Scottish expedition, to be sure, but with it the renewed problem – when should Glencairn sail, and, above all, when was the appropriate moment for the King himself to throw his weight into the fray?
In June 1653 Hyde was convinced that if ‘no more probable adventure’ offered itself, the King would go for Scotland.
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Yet Charles did not set out. It is true that at this point Cardinal Mazarin still held Charles in a clamp; he would neither release him nor assist him. Nevertheless, the fact has to be faced that Charles was by now profoundly sceptical about the Scots, their capacity to implement their own promises, their ability to bring any kind of victory to his advantage out of their bleak and feudacious country. Therefore any possible Highland rising was born suffering from the disease of the King’s secret disbelief – a condition which divided command did not help.
Nor can one criticize Charles for this conviction. As he had pointed out after Worcester, the Scots had not stuck by him in battle and were unlikely to do so when he was on the run; the same argument could be applied to a King in exile – the Scots were hardly likely to aid him whom they had failed to restore after his formal coronation at Scone. It was true that the English occupation, under the briskly iron rule of Colonel Robert, assisted the popularity of the absent Royalists. But there was no guarantee that this popularity would survive their actual appearance, since it had waned so many times before.
When this latest Highland rising did get under way, its progress confirmed these gloomy suppositions. There was a brief moment of glory when Middleton, the more experienced soldier, regained supreme command from Glencairn. But the treasured ability to form a proper Highland army and, having formed it, to lead it anywhere other than round and round the Highlands, was possessed by neither man. Help from abroad remained crucial. Might the Dutch come to the rescue? But by April 1654 the Dutch were no longer at war with the English Commonwealth. So hopes dwindled and ended with Middleton’s defeat at Dalnaspidal in July 1654.
Meanwhile in England itself the elevation of Oliver Cromwell to the quasi-royal rank of Lord Protector was another blow to the prestige of the uncrowned King. The position of Protector was one which had its roots in English history – both Somerset and Hertford had occupied it. After Cromwell’s assumption of the role, the Protectoral State replaced that of the
Commonwealth. It was a far more conventional concept. Negotiations between England and the various European powers were eased as a result.
France had indulged in a semi-official representation in England from late 1652 onwards in the shape of a clever, adaptable envoy, Antoine de Bordeaux. As the French Court settled back into its usual state of complacency, as the Cardinal resumed the reins of power twitched from his hands during the war of the Fronde, the melancholy observers of the exiled Royalist set began to suspect that yet another blow might be in store for them: the alliance of France and Commonwealth England. It would be the death-knell to Royalist hopes in France. Yet there was really nothing that King Charles, penniless, depressed and helpless, could do to avert it. He was thrust back on a series of diplomatic missions and enquiries – to the Danes, to Hamburg, Danzig, Poland, Queen Christina of Sweden, the German Diet and so forth – which, totted up, might win a prize for optimism and persistence, but achieved little positive result.
Money remained the key to absolutely everything, in the absence of the practical support of the great powers. Lack of money caused at least one mission to be withdrawn, since the emissary could not be supported. Already by 1652 the lack of money was chronic. The letters of the courtiers surrounding Charles began to be filled with the most poignant details of their penury. The childish jubilation of Richard Bellings on a mission to Ratisbon in April 1653, at having Christmas plum porridge, mince-pies, bakemeats and brawn, illustrates how low their expectations had become.
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It was not that the King was indifferent towards his friends’ sufferings – far from it. But his official means of support were virtually non-existent. Jermyn had secured a nominal pension of £6,000 from the French government in February 1652 in order to end the King’s maddening dependence on his mother. That sounded generous enough. But the pension was very seldom paid. Charles was thrust back on Loyalist contributions from England, a declining source of supply and surrounded by danger for those who tried to collect it. Privateers in the channel provided little joy: those from the Breton ports, while paying
lip service to a tithe due to the English King, got away with what they could. The haven of Jersey had surrendered to the Commonwealth in December 1651. There was only the remote hope of rich privateering prizes to be provided by Prince Rupert from the West Indies.
It is against this background that the piteous pleas of the courtiers should be seen. And it would all get worse.
Under the circumstances, the propagandist charges that Charles was extravagant, wanton with money, make ironic reading. Had the King wished to outshine the sun itself in munificence, he would still have had absolutely no opportunity to do so. He was still living under his mother’s roof at the Louvre. As he wrote to Rupert in the West Indies shortly before he left France, ‘I am sure I am not only without money but have been compelled to borrow all that I have spent these three months’
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– and these were necessary expenses of the sheer act of living.
Hyde laid his own charges that the young King, robbed of a sphere of proper action, became idle and pleasure-loving. How he nagged! The King did not write letters, the King did not attend to business, the King did this (bad) and did not do that (even worse). In short, he found that Charles’ character had not been improved by adversity. ‘God send us quickly from this place, for surely this lazy kind of life does nobody any good!’ he exclaimed.
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But it was not Paris and some fantasy existence of pleasure which was to blame, but an enforced life of disappointment.
Hyde’s temperament was not improved by adversity either. He looked for some explanation of their continued trials – much as a Calvinist might have done – and found it in the King’s lack of moral fibre, his inattention to the strict matter of the business. Charles was in effect the scapegoat. Hyde was in a more generous and a more accurate mood when he wrote, ‘If you knew the miserable life the King leads, and how he is used, you would believe that he acts his own part not amiss; nor is it enough to say that it is his own fault….’
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It was no wonder that by the summer of 1653 Charles had fallen ill with a fever. Its exact nature was undiagnosed, except
that he had to have blood let five times. But in view of the fact that contemporaries commented on his depression and withdrawal, one may suppose it to have been at least partly psychosomatic in origin, one of those fevers which the healthy Charles would have shrugged off without difficulty, but now laid him painfully low.
Relief, when it came, came in the form of change, rather than any true lightening of the situation. Nevertheless, to the King a change – any change – was obviously beneficial after the darkness into which he had been plunged at the French Court. As the steps of the diplomatic dance in which Protector and Cardinal were involved quickened, it suddenly suited the French to be rid of their dependent. Having been at times cozened by Mazarin, at times virtually imprisoned by him, Charles now found himself offered what his heart most desired – the full payment of his French pension – on condition that he left the country within ten days.
The gesture had very little grace about it: the French made it clear that the step was a necessary preparation for an English alliance. Nor was the departure of the King particularly ceremonious: he travelled on horseback, having put his coach-horses into ‘a light cart’ to convey his clothes and bedding. It was not quite the abject wretchedness of the post-Worcester period, but it was far from the state of a reigning monarch. Hyde wrote of his departure that ‘the King is now as low as to human understanding as he can be’.
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Yet at least Charles, literally putting the French Court, with its frustrations and chicaneries, behind him, had hope. And he was once more on his own, without his mother. As the years drew on and their differences increased, her presence aroused in him a combination of profound irritation and melancholy affection, which he was glad to avoid.
Indeed, first at Spa and then at Aachen for a month or two Charles actually found life rather fun. The decision to go to Spa was not of course taken from a very wide choice: Holland would not have him, and the various territories within and around the
Holy Roman Empire, on the borders of the Spanish Netherlands, offered the best alternative.
At Spa, the impoverished little band whistled to keep up their spirits, and, as descriptions of their life show, to a certain extent succeeded. It was high summer. All the afternoon the courtiers would dance, then take supper, then dance again in the evening light in the meadows: ‘I think the air makes them indefatigable’ was one comment.
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The inclement weather, which was supposed to have affected the famous mineral waters of the Spa, obviously did not spoil this rustic fun. And the weather did not prevent salubrious bathing in Caesar’s Bath.
One of the chief dancers was Theobald Lord Taaffe, an Anglo-Irish peer who had fought with Ormonde in the late 1640s. He had not done particularly well militarily, but he had later joined Charles in Paris, where, according to the Cardinal de Retz, he had become ‘Great Chamberlain, Valet de Chambre, Clerk of the Kitchen, Cup Bearer and all’ to the King – in short, that kind of necessary mixture of courtier, agent and boon companion of which all Kings stand in need, particularly those without proper courts. Taaffe had something else in common with his master – a relationship with Lucy Walter. He was probably the father of her second child, Mary Walter.
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In Brussels Taaffe negotiated with the Duke of Lorraine, mortgaging the Fort of Duncannon to him on Charles’ behalf for funds; there was also a proposal to marry James to one of the Duke of Lorraine’s illegitimate children, and pop the pair of them on an independent throne in Ireland.
Apart from his usefulness as a confidant, Taaffe’s chief value to the King was in his Catholicism. He could thus be used as an intermediary with the Pope or with the Catholic Count of Neuburg, without the potentate feeling insulted. Certainly Taaffe enjoyed a close and warm friendship with his sovereign throughout nearly all the years of exile (only clouded over towards the end, when Taaffe killed Sir William Keith in a duel over a tennis bet – for Charles maintained very strict anti-duelling rules). As much as anyone, Taaffe understood exactly what depressions, disappointments – and pleasures – marked the long exile of King Charles
II
.
As Taaffe danced, and on occasion waxed ‘poetical’, the more stable side of Charles’ entourage was represented by the Marquess of Ormonde. And the mimic court was further gilded by the arrival of Mary Princess of Orange. Brother and sister occupied the two chief hotels at the Spa with their suites. Their mutual devotion was the subject of sentimental and approving comment, while Mary’s widowed status involved her in various romantic rumours, including the notion that she might now marry her cousin Prince Rupert. There were other rumours too – that another eligible lady, the eccentric Queen Christina of Sweden, might join them. It was just as well the Royalists were unaware that the Swedish Queen was also somewhere in her strange heart sighing after Oliver Cromwell, professing herself ‘
vestra amica
Christina’ and treasuring the Protector’s portrait.
Brother and sister went to Aachen. On 7 September the King, all in black, with white silk stockings and the ever-present colour of the Garter, visited the Cathedral of Charlemagne at the invitation of the Canons. Mary kissed the skull and hand of the great Emperor, and Charles measured his sword against his own. There was plenty of mirth and dancing and drinking. It was all very jolly and apparently carefree and gracious at the same time. Charles was described as winning universal regard by his ‘affable and free carriage’. It was left to an English spy to write a secret report to John Thurloe, Cromwell’s Secretary of State and master of the Protectoral intelligence network: ‘For all his dancing, I believe he [the King] has a heavy heart.’
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By the beginning of autumn that was undoubtedly true. The upsurge of optimism consequent on departure from France had waned. The courtiers’ obsessional interest in their own poverty had taken over from their gaiety: Aachen was described as ‘a most expenseful place’, at five pence a night for a bed.
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Their complaints about local prices and their own lack of cash remind one of the sufferings of British travellers denied foreign currency after the Second World War.
When the King and his sister decided to pass on to Cologne in early October it was because they hoped that this free archbishopric, owing no allegiance to the Emperor, would
provide the right base for their next step – whatever that might be.
On the surface all went well. Mary discovered ‘a very fair and curious house, full of decent rooms and pleasant gardens’ for their lodging. The City Magistrates presented silver pots and wine to fill the pots. There were receptions for the royal brother and sister at the local Jesuit College, where young boys sang to them with great sweetness, and at convents round about. The natives being so friendly, and pressing them to stay, Charles graciously acceded to their invitation, and decided to take up residence in the city. The courtiers, ignoring the fact that very soon wages were owing to them all and there was little or no hope of payment, were once again resolutely cheerful: ‘We are as brave and eat as well and are as jocund, as if we were in all plenty, so confident we are of God’s continuance in his wonderful Providence towards us.’
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