To Catch A King: Charles II's Great Escape. Charles Spencer

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СКАЧАТЬ Bradshaw was prominent among those regicides with a very different view of how things must now be. A lawyer plucked from obscurity to become lord president of the impromptu court that had sent the king to his doom, Bradshaw saw the execution of a tyrannical ruler as a thrilling act that should be celebrated, and then built upon. While Cromwell hoped the king’s death would demark a full stop, Bradshaw saw it as a mere comma in the unfurling script of England’s electrifying new story.

      Those who had overseen Charles I’s execution dominated the Council of State, the executive body established the month after the king’s death. A replacement for the Privy Council, it was responsible for domestic and foreign policy, as well as the security of England and Wales. Eighteen of its forty-one councillors had been among those to sign the royal death warrant.

      All of the councillors and the other regicides could agree on one thing: that the fledgling republic needed to be sustained. But there were others who felt that a unique opportunity for constitutional change had been lamentably mismanaged. They had suffered in the fight against the king, and now expected their aspirations to be honoured. Among them was a radical group known to its detractors as ‘the Levellers’.

      The Levellers were still working on their manifesto, which they had begun two years earlier, at the time of the king’s death. An Agreement of the People was intended to be the blueprint for a written constitution, stating the inalienable rights of all Englishmen, and detailing the contract between them and their elected representatives. It demanded equality for all before the law, and that the vote be open to all men over twenty-one, other than Royalists, servants and beggars. England’s New Chaines Discovered, published immediately after the establishment of the Council of State, was a protest that these hopes had been ignored. The Levellers accused the new government of seizing power from the people. Their leaders were arrested for their effrontery.

      But this movement, based on principle, remained dangerous in the months following the execution of the king, and it had support in the army, which had suffered so greatly in the cause against the Crown. Richard Lockier, one of the Levellers’ leaders, was captured, then executed by firing squad outside St Paul’s Cathedral in late April 1649. This stoked up a wider military mutiny. There were many in the army who had been inspired by Leveller ideas, and who were also furious at arrears in their pay, while being frightened at the prospect of being sent to fight in the graveyard of disease-ridden, boggy Ireland. Cromwell defeated the main mutineer force, in a night attack at Burford in Oxfordshire. While 300 of them were pardoned, three of the ringleaders were shot in the village’s churchyard. Even though Cromwell could declare the Leveller threat in the army over by the end of May 1649, there was still much for the new regime to settle before it could consider itself established. A myriad of hopes had been raised by the toppling of the Crown, and not all of them could be satisfied.

      Six weeks after Charles I’s beheading, kingship was abolished, Parliament declaring: ‘The office of a King in a nation, and to have power thereof in a single person, was unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety, and public interest of the people, and therefore ought to be abolished.’1

      In a further dramatic break with the past, the Royal Seal in the House of Commons was smashed into pieces by a hammer-wielding labourer. Its replacement contained the text: ‘In the First Year of Freedom, by God’s Blessing Restored.’ Ancient liberties, notionally lost under centuries of kingship, were being celebrated and reinstated under the new regime: the Commonwealth.

      John Bradshaw’s allies included two men who were responsible for the twin struts of the new regime’s printed propaganda. The great poet and man of letters John Milton, who now championed the regicides in written duels with their European detractors, was given the title of Secretary for Foreign Tongues.

      Meanwhile Milton’s friend Marchamont Nedham – a journalist and pamphleteer who had supported Parliament, then sided with the king, before getting firmly behind the new republic – oversaw the influential weekly newsbook Mercurius Politicus from June 1650. He took on this important journalistic role at a key moment in the Commonwealth’s campaign to make the republic more devout. The Puritan leadership felt this was required in order to secure God’s continuing favour. In May 1650 Parliament passed an Act condemning those guilty of incest, adultery and fornication. The incestuous and adulterous could expect the death penalty, ‘without clergy’ being in attendance at their end. Fornicators received a three-month prison sentence for their first offence. A few months later, the blasphemous joined the swelling ranks of outlaws.

      Mercurius Politicus produced journalism of the highest class, engaging correspondents throughout Europe, while having access to the republic’s all-seeing spy network. Nedham was given a salary of £100 a year, ‘whereby he may subsist while endeavouring to serve the Commonwealth’.2

      The rise of printed domestic news and propaganda was a pronounced feature of the English Civil War. The first such publication, The Heads of Severall Proceedings in this Present Parliament, appeared in November 1641, nine months before hostilities began. There was then an explosion of the printed word, with approximately 300 different partisan newsbooks competing for attention during the 1640s and 1650s. Although many faded away after a few issues, several of them appeared with regularity, the most popular having a run of up to 1,500 copies at a time.3

      Milton and Nedham were both relentless promoters of the kingless state. One of their constant refrains was the merciless mockery of any who proposed that Charles, Prince of Wales – who was sometimes referred to as ‘the Young Pretender’ – should regain his family’s throne. These attacks showed what a terrifying prospect it was for those who had killed the father, should the son return to hold them to account.

      The question for those Royalists who had been so decisively defeated in two civil wars, between the summers of 1642 and 1648, was who would provide the manpower to make it possible to challenge Parliament’s army, now their own forces had been crushed. The answer to this was most vigorously addressed by the widowed queen.

      When Henrietta Maria was informed of her husband’s execution, she stood mute and motionless for an age, seized by a shock that she seems not to have come fully to terms with during the remaining twenty years of her life. In the aftermath of Charles I’s death she retreated briefly to a Carmelite nunnery. On re-emerging she wore mourning clothes, and would do so for the rest of her days.

      Henrietta Maria wrote of her wish to ‘retire with only two maids, my secretary, and confessor, to private life, to finish my days with the least possible disturbance, disentangled from the world’.4 She could not forget, though, the hopes and wishes that her husband had shared with her during the darkest periods of the later years of his rule.

      In July 1646 he had written to her: ‘And though the worst should come, yet I conjure thee to turn thy grief into a just revenge upon my enemies, and the repossessing of Prince Charles into his inheritances.’5 Two months earlier he had sent a letter to his eldest son that had equal clarity: ‘I command you to obey [your mother] in everything, except religion, concerning which I am confident she will not trouble you.’6

      Charles was convinced that his wife could be a great support to their eldest son, for he knew how heavily he himself had leant on her throughout the Civil Wars. When the king’s baggage train was captured at the battle of Naseby in June 1645, the correspondence unearthed there revealed the full extent of Henrietta Maria’s hold over her husband. One letter particularly appalled Parliament. In it, Charles had written: ‘I give thee power to promise in my name, to whom thou thinkest most fit, that I will take away all the penal СКАЧАТЬ