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

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СКАЧАТЬ religious settlement for Scotland. Presbyterianism was, to Wariston, ‘more than all the world’, and ‘he looked on the Covenant as the setting of Christ on His throne’.14 Any who refused to have such beliefs as the cornerstone of their lives must, he argued, be disqualified from public office.

      The religious collision between king and Kirk led to the Bishops’ Wars of 1639 and 1640. The Scots invaded England, taking Newcastle and threatening advances further south. The urgent need to settle the wars forced Charles to call England’s Parliament in April 1640, for the first time in eleven years. Though the ‘Short Parliament’ lasted just three weeks, a chain of events had been set in motion that eventually culminated in the English Civil War, as Members of Parliament insisted on having a long list of grievances addressed, while the king asserted his independence from the demands of his subjects. This political conflict was exacerbated by the keenly felt religious principles on both sides.

      In 1643, with Royalist victories mounting and the loss of the Civil War looking possible, Parliament sought the Scots’ help. An alliance was sealed through the Solemn League and Covenant. This agreement guaranteed the preservation of Presbyterianism in Scotland, and seemed to the Scots to promise that England and Ireland would fall into line once Charles I had been defeated.

      A Scottish civil war took place from 1644 to 1647, between the Covenanters and their Royalist opponents. James, 1st Marquess of Montrose, led the king’s army, a mixture of Scottish clansmen and Irish troops under Alasdair MacColla.

The charismatic Montrose won a string of remarkable victories with his small force. He repeatedly humiliated the Covenanter leader, the Marquess of Argyll, whose ruthlessness was not matched by either military ability or courage.* It was noted how reluctant Argyll was to engage with the Royalist champion. When he did, it did not go well for him.

      The climax came at the battle of Inverlochy, near Ben Nevis, in February 1645. Argyll excused himself from the fight, claiming that he had a dislocated shoulder, and elected to watch proceedings from his boat in the nearby loch. From there he witnessed what was to be the bloodiest defeat his clan would ever suffer. Montrose’s significantly outnumbered men cut down 1,500 Campbells. After the battle was lost, Argyll was rowed away to safety.

      Montrose’s victorious run was finally brought to an end when he was surprised in heavy mist by a large force under Lieutenant General David Leslie, at Philiphaugh in September 1645. This reverse occurred three months after the main English Royalist army had been trounced at Naseby, and added to the escalating despair in Charles I’s ranks. Montrose, refused a pardon, went into exile in Norway. The English king now seemed to have no Scottish cards left to play.

      Despite this, in the spring of 1646, defeated in England and looking for a way forward, Charles I misguidedly handed himself over to the Scots. He had hoped that the allies of his English enemies would now support him, perhaps out of some underlying loyalty to his Stuart blood, but also because he had been fed inaccurate information about the Scots’ attitude to him by the French ambassador to England. The Scots, intrigued but confused by the appearance of their leading opponent in their midst, repeatedly tried to persuade Charles to take the Covenant, explaining that if he did not, they would be unable help him. But the king refused.

      Charles had written to Henrietta Maria, earlier that year, saying that he would do anything to get Scottish aid as long as it did not involve him ‘giving up the Church of England, with which I will not part upon any condition whatsoever’.15 While he dug his heels in, citing his unshakeable religious principles, he was also aware of the political importance of his stance: ‘The nature of Presbyterian government is to steal or force the Crown from the king’s head,’ he told Henrietta Maria. ‘For their chief maxim is (and I know it to be true), that all kings must submit to Christ’s kingdom, of which they are the sole governors … so that yielding to the Scots in this particular, I should both go against my conscience and ruin my crown.’16

      Henrietta Maria had agreed with her husband’s assessment. She told him, in a letter of October 1646, when the First English Civil War was lost: ‘We must endeavour to have the Scots for us, without nevertheless taking the Covenant, or doing anything which shall be dishonourable … since we have suffered so much, we must resolve to finish with honour.’

      The king stuck to his views for several months, with no hint of compromise, leaving the Scots with no choice but to believe him when he said that he was not for turning. They had long made it clear that their God came before their monarch, and in early 1647 they effectively sold him to England’s Parliament, on condition that no harm would come to him – he was, after all, their king too.

      There were, though, some moderate Covenanters who were open to a compromise with the king. They were party to ‘the Engagement’, an agreement that was secretly negotiated in December 1647 while Charles was held prisoner by Parliament on the Isle of Wight. Charles guaranteed these Scottish allies a confirmation of the Solemn League and Covenant in London’s Parliament, provided neither he nor any other Englishman was obliged to take the Covenant. There would also be steps towards unification of the two kingdoms, with the Scots being allowed a greater say in the government of England until that plan reached fruition. In return, Charles I was to be rescued from his island imprisonment and taken to London, where a settlement would be forced out of his enemies in Parliament. The main Scottish army would stand poised to invade if the king’s and the Engagers’ demands were rejected.

      Argyll, Wariston and the other hardline Covenanters were against any such alliance, because it would compromise their rigid religious beliefs. They felt vindicated when the Engagers’ army was destroyed at the battle of Preston, in August 1648. The Kirk party was now left in control in Scotland. In January 1649 it decreed that any who had agreed to the Engagement must be barred from public office.

      The news of the execution of the king at the end of that same month changed everything. It provoked horror throughout Scotland. The Kirk already felt that Parliament had failed to honour its commitment to settle Presbyterianism on England. Now it had also, contrary to its promise, beheaded the Scots’ king.

      In Edinburgh on 5 February 1649, six days after Charles I’s execution, Prince Charles was proclaimed king of Scotland, England and Ireland. War with England was from that point inevitable.

      While the Covenanters were quick to proclaim the exiled prince ‘King Charles II’, they made it clear that he could not actually rule until he had signed the National Covenant, with its guarantees of religious and political union. The following month a delegation of Covenanters travelled to see Charles in the Netherlands, and presented him with a bundle, carefully bound in one form, containing their demands and creeds, with the Covenant at its core.

      Charles was startled by the terms offered. ‘They presented to him three propositions, demanding that he should banish Montrose & all other malignants and evil counselors from his court; that he should take the Covenant himself & establish it through all his dominions; & that he should bring but an hundred persons with him into Scotland, among which there should be none that had bore arms for his late Majesty.’17

      Charles’s disappointment at the proposals was aggravated by the attitude of his hosts, the deputies of the various Dutch States, who encouraged him to agree to any terms put forward by the Scots. They knew he had nowhere else to turn, other than to Ireland, and that would involve what was, to them, a deeply troubling alliance with Roman Catholics.

      But Charles still had hopes that Ireland could prove to be his saviour, because the Royalists there had allied with a Catholic confederacy to form a significant force. The СКАЧАТЬ