King Charles II (6 page)

A
s the early years of Charles’ life had been golden, so the next were to be tarnished. A secure childhood gave way to a youth marked by a series of traumatic incidents.

Increasingly the King took his eldest son into his own care and company, and tried to associate him with his own decisions. This was partly the natural move of the time to take aristocratic boys out of female-dominated society. There was nothing particularly upsetting about that. But in Charles’ case the situation was aggravated by the need to prove to the world at large that the Prince of Wales was in no way over-influenced by the Roman Catholic Queen.

Charles was also allowed – carefully supervised – his own little sorties. There was, for example, a visit to Cambridge in March 1641, a fairly typical royal visit not only by the standards of the time but also by our own, except for the youth of the royal visitor. At Peterhouse, Charles, accompanied by Buckingham, Francis Villiers and another high-born orphan, the Duke of Richmond, all chaperoned by Dr Duppa, received an honorary Master of Arts degree from the Vice-Chancellor. He also received two pairs of embroidered gloves from the same source and from the Provost of King’s a Bible. So far so good. But in King’s Chapel the Prince was considered to have failed by
omitting to say his prayers into his hat according to the undergraduate custom. Dinner at Trinity Hall, however, passed without incident, and afterwards Charles watched two plays, including Abraham Cowley’s
The Guardian
, enhanced by a Prologue addressed to him personally.

Finally he was allowed to join his father at Newmarket.

On the way back there was another stop at Cambridge, with the pleasant sound of the undergraduates of Trinity shouting ‘Vivat Rex!’ to greet his father’s ears – although Cambridge was a town reputedly much permeated by Puritanism. Since the previous year, it had been represented in Parliament by Oliver Cromwell, a man already gaining notoriety for his views on the need to restrain monarchical authority in some way. In the Civil War itself, as the University towns polarized, it was to be Oxford which declared for the King, Cambridge becoming a Parliamentarian stronghold. But the visit began and ended pleasantly from Charles’ point of view, since his father presented him with some sweetmeats for the return journey.

The first clearly traumatic incident occurred when Charles was ten years old. It concerned the trial of the King’s servant Strafford. As other families in their intimate hearts are haunted by the early bankruptcy of the breadwinner, the abandonment by one beloved parent, or some other harsh, unassimilable tragedy, so this royal family of Stuart was to be haunted by the death of Strafford. Need he have died? Could he have been saved? Was there any point, ultimately, in the cruel sacrifice?

It is possible to discern in Charles himself a real Strafford complex, in modern phraseology. His father did much to augment it in the last years of his life, as the King became increasingly tormented by the memory of the (useless) betrayal. By August 1646 he was impressing on his son the ‘negative direction which is never to abandon the protection of your friends under any pretension whatsoever’. (In the original draft of the letter, the King was even more explicit: ‘Never to give way to the punishment of any for their faithful service to the Crown, upon whatever pretence, or for whatsoever cause.’
¹
) But Charles’ own recollections of Strafford, as well as his father’s remorse, must have played their part.

The facts were as follows. Thomas Wentworth, later Earl of Strafford, had been sent to Ireland as Lord Deputy in 1633, to try and introduce some semblance of order into those Augean Stables. To a certain extent this man of ‘deep policy, stern resolution and ambitious zeal to keep up the glory of his own greatness’, as Lucy Hutchinson called him, had been successful.
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To Charles he was more simply a benevolent figure who despatched him hawks from his mews in the name of his own son Will. But to the King, the memory remained of a tough statesman, one who had shown himself capable in the past of welding together a vociferous House of Commons and putting himself, in so far as anyone could in this age before official ministerial appointments and recognized political parties, at the head of a coherent group.

The military proceedings of 1639 against the Scots had ended in a stalemate, with both sides, King and Covenanters, agreeing to disband their forces, and neither in fact doing so. Already, in this critical situation, Strafford, who had returned from Ireland at the King’s request, was moving into the position of the King’s chief counsellor. When the King, hobbled by lack of money and lack of political support against the Scots, finally called Parliament in the spring of 1640, it was Strafford who advised him to do so. And when the King dissolved this assembly again in May – hence its historical name of the Short Parliament – it was with the aid of Strafford’s practical management.

A further military action in the summer of 1640 resulted in the humiliation of the English forces by the Scots at Newburn, near Newcastle. None of this helped the King’s cause against his English Parliamentary opponents: the Newburn rout in particular occurred just as the King, at York, was trying to avoid calling another English Parliament. It was easy for the Parliamentary opposition
^fn1
to see that they had more in common with the so-called Scottish enemies than with the Crown.

On 3 November that body to be known as the Long Parliament met for the first time. The intention of the opposition under the great Parliamentary leader John Pym was to demand the resolution of their manifold grievances against the Crown. One of the first of these grievances was embodied in the person of ‘Black Tom Tyrant’, as Strafford was bitterly designated. It was the Irish association which was fatal. The Irish troops which Strafford was discovered to be offering the King as aid against the Scots became in the minds of the excitable Commons a fearful force of Papist invaders. Strafford was to be the scapegoat of the whole corpus of the King’s unsatisfactory policies.

There were various weapons at Parliament’s command. Foremost amongst these was impeachment. This involved the bringing of charges against a particular person for crimes against the State: the ‘articles of impeachment’ could be prepared by either House, although Strafford, because he was a peer, had to be impeached at the bar of the House of Lords. Then there was the possibility of introducing an Act of Attainder against an individual, for high treason. The penalty for high treason was death, as well as the forfeiture of titles and offices. Like any other measure passed by Parliament, an Act of Attainder needed the assent of both houses before it became law – and of course the assent of the King himself.

Strafford was duly impeached at the instance of the House of Commons and in March 1641 there began his trial following that impeachment. Taking place in Westminster Hall, it would seem afterwards like a kind of awful dress rehearsal for the ordeal of the King, set on the same stage eight years later. Charles attended the seven weeks of proceedings daily. By virtue of his title as Prince of Wales, he sat to the right of his father’s throne, wearing the full robes of his rank. The throne itself was left empty. The King did attend, but in order to remain incognito – in theory, if not in practice – stationed himself in a box; he was accompanied at times by the Queen, his brother-in-law the Elector Palatine, and his daughter Mary. For the time being all eyes were focused not on the master but on the servant: Strafford was positioned on a raised platform amidst the spectators. Proud of his service, confident in his own
integrity, Strafford from time to time exchanged smiles across the crowded room with the King.

His confidence was misplaced. It was true that the trial itself failed, but immediately afterwards the old lion of Parliament, John Pym, with his young lions at his heels, called for an Act of Attainder. The House of Commons voted it through. All Strafford’s ‘sinewy’ arguments that he had not committed treason were in vain.

The King too felt a misplaced confidence that he could save his servant. Strafford wrote a formal release to his master, offering to have his own life sacrificed ‘towards that blessed agreement which God, I trust, shall for ever establish betwixt you and your subjects. … Besides, to a willing man there is no injury done.’ The King did not think it would come to that.
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He reckoned without that dread new European phenomenon, a politically activated mob. Rumour was in the hands of the people, Shakespeare’s pipe:

Of so easy and so plain a stop

That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,

The still-discordant wavering multitude, can play upon it.

This maddened mob was thronging round the palace of Whitehall, even breaking into its outer chambers.

It was true that there were rumours, rumours everywhere. As the people could be heard howling for the blood of the Catholic Queen, her cause was further damaged by the presence of another Catholic Queen, her own mother, under her roof: Marie de Medici had taken refuge in England from the various troubles of France a few years earlier. Certainly the wavering multitude had many tuneful rumours at their disposal: these included the story that a French (Catholic) army had landed at Portsmouth, inspired by Henrietta Maria, and that an Irish (Catholic) army had been ordered by Strafford to come to the King’s assistance.

The King hesitated. On 2 May he married off Charles’ nine-year-old sister Mary to the fifteen-year-old Prince of Orange, son of the Stadtholder of the Netherlands. It was hoped that Parliament, like a hungry dog smelling meat, would be appeased
by the somewhat small bone of this Protestant but otherwise unremarkable match.
^fn2
Parliament was not appeased. By 10 May the King could hesitate no longer. The royal assent to Strafford’s execution was given.

The next day he decided to send Charles down to the House of Lords with a desperate yet somehow embarrassed message. Could not Strafford ‘fulfil the natural course of his life in a close imprisonment’? If this could be done without ‘the discontentment of my people’ it would be ‘an unspeakable contentment’ to the King. But of course if nothing less than Strafford’s life would satisfy this same people, then the King must say ‘Fiat Justitia’. Even the postscript after the King’s signature had a rather shabby sound to it: ‘and if Strafford must die, it were charity to reprieve him until Saturday’.
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Armed with this paper, the nine-year-old Prince of Wales did not succeed in convincing Parliament to stay its hand.

Strafford was executed the next day.

As Laud (himself imprisoned and subsequently executed) observed, Strafford was dead with ‘more honour than any of them will gain which hunted after his life’. In particular, he was dead with more honour than his royal master was alive. Charles, the witness to all this, including those popular threats of harm to his mother which had probably precipitated his father’s assent, was growing up with a vengeance.

About the time of Strafford’s execution, Charles’ first governor, Newcastle, resigned his charge. The new incumbent, the Marquess of Hertford, was an odd hangover of royal history. Twenty-five years earlier he had married in secret James
I
’s cousin Arbella Stuart. The King was furious when he found out, suspecting Hertford of aiming at the succession. The marriage had been quashed, the couple imprisoned. That period of Hertford’s past was long forgotten, but his very age made him an ineffective governor, compared to Newcastle. At the same time the House of Commons was becoming increasingly
aggressive on the subject of the Prince of Wales: the Puritan element questioned whether Charles should not be surrounded by more suitable attendants than those designated by his father and, above all, by his mother. It was the measure of the importance given to the role that John Hampden himself was said to desire the post of the Prince’s governor, in order to instruct him in ‘principles suitable as to what should be established as laws’.
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As a counterpoint, the Scots from across the border were vociferous in their claim that the Prince, like his father, should spend more time in Scotland.

If ten years before it had been thought important that the very rockers of Charles’ cradle should be Protestants, how much more vital was the religion of his tutors! When the King planned a new expedition – of negotiation and discussion – to Scotland in the summer of 1641, certain members of the House of Commons, including Oliver Cromwell, proposed that Hertford alone was inadequate to escort the Prince of Wales. He should be stiffened by two good Puritan lords in the shape of Lords Bedford, and Saye and Sele. Charles did not in fact accompany his father, but the controversy raged on. Two sets of proposals put by Parliament to the King, the Ten Propositions of June 1641 and the Nineteen Propositions a year later, made specific suggestions for the upbringing of Charles and the rest of the young royal family.

In October 1641 there were squabbles with the Commons about Charles’ education: one faction demanded that only ‘safe’ people (religiously safe, not Popish) should be allowed near him. The arguments were still going on in January 1642. That was the month in which the King, failing in his attempt to arrest five Members of the Commons, was humiliatingly rebuffed by the Speaker of the House himself. So finally he left the capital.

The following six months of the year were spent by both sides, King and Parliament, in preparations for a war which no-one thought particularly desirable, but almost everyone now thought was inevitable. The King reacted to the Commons’ threats concerning his son by keeping Charles more closely with him, rather than less. In any case, the role of the father was made heavier by the fact that Henrietta Maria left for the
Continent in February to try and raise money for arms by selling her jewels. There were happy periods of respite: another jaunt to Cambridge and a visit to the Ferrars family at nearby Little Gidding, where Charles ate apple pie and cheese in the pantry and they all played cards. But in general life was more serious, as the King prepared earnestly if sadly for the coming contest. A letter from Charles to his sister Mary in Holland, written in March from Royston, refers to the King as ‘very much disconsolate and troubled, partly for my royal mother’s and your absence, and partly for the disturbances of the kingdom’. (Mary had not travelled abroad at the time of her marriage, but did so a year later with Henrietta Maria.) It is a laborious composition, no doubt written under duress – what eleven-year-old boy ever wrote voluntarily to his younger sister? Only in the latter half does a hint of Charles’ own cheerful temperament creep in: ‘Dear sister, we are as much as we may merry, and more than we would sad, in respect we cannot alter the present distempers of these troublesome times.’
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