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

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СКАЧАТЬ One of the main charges levelled against the king by his Puritan and Presbyterian enemies had been that he was secretly sympathetic to Roman Catholicism, thanks to his wife’s corrosive influence. This letter conclusively proved the point.

      Henrietta Maria knew her husband to be weak, and easily swayed by his advisers. She wrote despairingly of how he was apt ‘to take sudden counsels’,8 many of which, she felt, ran contrary to the Crown’s and her family’s interests.

      This situation had become much more difficult for Henrietta Maria to control after she and Charles parted at Abingdon, for what would turn out to be the last time, on 17 April 1644. She had hugged her husband’s knees, begging him to let her stay by his side. But he was adamant that she must go abroad, to secure him aid. Her usefulness in that purpose overrode his thoughts for himself, because, he said, her remaining with him would be his ‘greatest consolation’. ‘And I found myself ten leagues distant from him,’ the queen would recall, ‘before I became conscious that I had left him, so much did grief overcome my natural senses’.9 The great sadness of parting aside, Henrietta Maria was also troubled at leaving her husband far removed from her controlling hand.

      The queen was proud to be a child of one of France’s great kings, Henri IV, who had been stabbed to death by an assassin when she was less than six months old. She hoped that those who governed the land of her birth would respect her position as one of its princesses, and choose to help her family in its quest for restoration to its royal powers. But the French were embroiled in European conflict, principally the Franco–Spanish War, which had started in 1635 and would rumble on till 1659. They also had to contend with the ‘Fronde’, their own civil war, which erupted in 1648, largely brought about by the huge cost of funding France’s wars.

      Meanwhile Henrietta Maria’s brother, Louis XIII, died in 1643. She had hoped he would help her and her husband to overpower the English rebels. Now, she found, France’s leading figures were mostly delighted to stand and watch the spectacle across the Channel as their centuries-old enemy tore itself in two.

      Henrietta Maria had written to her only surviving brother, the Duke of Orléans, at the beginning of 1646: ‘I expect nothing but entire ruin, unless France assists us.’10 But Orléans was unable to help. He was frequently at odds with Anne of Austria, his young nephew Louis XIV’s mother and regent, and with the chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin. Meanwhile Anne and Mazarin’s foreign policy was focused on the fight with Spain, with England’s discord merely a delicious side dish.

      Despite this, Mazarin, the consummate diplomat, seemed to promise much to Henrietta Maria. ‘Had I believed Cardinal Mazarin,’ she wrote, ‘I should have thought he was putting to sea with the most powerful army that had ever left France, for the help of our lost kingdoms.’ After being repeatedly let down by him, she concluded bitterly ‘that all that he said was only a cheat to quiet me’. But she never gave up hope that France could be persuaded to do the right thing for her and for her family.

      When Mazarin funded the Duke of Modena in a failed bid against Spain, Henrietta Maria told him that France’s support for her husband would have cost half as much, and that it would have succeeded. ‘To which,’ she recalled, ‘the cardinal made no reply, but took a hasty leave, showing by his mode of treating me, that he no longer recognized me as a queen, and the daughter of a French monarch.’11

      While Henrietta Maria may have said that she considered herself just ‘a poor and wretched widow, in the flood of her miserable emotions’, she busily explored all avenues for retrieving her husband’s lost crown. These included the possibility of hiring the Duke of Lorraine’s forces, or of trusting in the goodwill of Denmark or Sweden. But in the end for various reasons these came to nothing. Ireland and Scotland were left as the most promising springboards for restoring the Stuart cause. The queen and her intimates looked at the Roman Catholicism of the Irish, and the Presbyterianism of the Scottish, and decided the sacrifice of siding with either was a price worth paying, given the magnitude of their ultimate goal.

      But the past could not be wished away. Charles I’s rule of Scotland had been poorly judged. He had no first-hand experience of Scottish politics, which were enmeshed in the rigidity of the nation’s Church – the ‘Kirk’ – and in the undulating power of the various noble factions. Nor did he appreciate how the physical absence from Scotland of his father (King James returned to his homeland just once during his twenty-two years on the English throne), and then of himself, had left a power vacuum that had, in large part, been filled by the Kirk.

      For its part, the Kirk had supreme confidence in its power, seeing itself as the earthly manager of God’s wishes. It viewed monarchs as royal magistrates, who served a useful purpose but were unworthy of veneration. The Kirk was happy to hold them individually to account for their human fallibility: a sinner was a sinner, no matter how garlanded his family tree.

      Charles I believed with equal passion that the Church must be a spiritual reflection of the hierarchical world of which, he felt certain, he was at the social and political summit. He believed in the importance of bishops, regarding them as being, like himself, selected by God. He also viewed them as powerful allies across his kingdoms: ‘the pulpits … teach obedience [to the Crown]’, he wrote in late 1646.12

      Charles attempted to impose his High Church beliefs on Scotland during the late 1630s, by insisting on the use of the Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer. His high-handedness brought about the National Covenant in 1638. This was an undertaking by the Kirk, on behalf of the Scottish nation, to adhere to the doctrines previously approved by Scotland’s Parliament, and to reject any religious interference. While the Covenant acknowledged Scotland’s obedience to the Crown, it also warned that, if pushed, the people would fight for their God against their king.

      The Covenanters would, essentially, form the government of Scotland from 1638 to 1651, with the 1st Marquess of Argyll – the slight, cross-eyed, redheaded chief of Clan Campbell – as its leading aristocratic light. Charles I had tried to win over Argyll early on, inviting him to London in 1638. During that visit Argyll left the king in no doubt as to his distaste for his religious plans for Scotland. Insulted rather than enlightened, Charles hatched a secret plan for vengeance, approving an invasion of Argyll’s lands by Irish sympathisers who allied with the Campbells’ bitter enemies, the MacDonalds. These low tactics turned Argyll from a man who was merely at odds with the king’s spiritual policies into a livid Covenanter, eager to champion his nation’s religious and political freedoms under one banner.

      Another leading Covenanter was the lawyer Sir Archibald Johnston, Lord Wariston, who was powered by intense religious convictions. The loss of Wariston’s first wife in 1633, when he was twenty-two, seems to have pitched him into a terrible place, from which he emerged with an endless appetite for godliness. Wariston would sleep for only three hours a night, passing his long days in bewilderingly drawn-out prayers and meditations. Dinner guests noted one evening that when he said grace, it took him an hour to reach ‘Amen’. While his regular devotions took three hours at a time, he must have surprised even himself when he realised that the prayers he had started at six o’clock one morning had only ended at eight o’clock that evening.

      This fanatical piety gained respect amongst other Covenanters, and this readily crossed over into political influence. Wariston’s home, near Mercat Cross in Edinburgh, became the meeting place for the leading members of the Kirk, the night before the opening of each annual General Assembly. There they would agree in advance ‘the choosing of the Moderator, Committees, and chief points of the Assembly’.13

      Wariston СКАЧАТЬ