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

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СКАЧАТЬ the Lords’ ruling that she and her two brothers return to their father’s household in Wales.

      Lucy was a raven-haired, blue-eyed seventeen-year-old beauty, endowed with a shrewdness to match her striking looks. John Evelyn, who shared a carriage ride with the teenaged girl, marked her down in his diary as a ‘brown, beautiful, bold, but insipid creature’,17 while James II thought her ‘very handsome, of little wit, and some cunning’.18

      What marked Lucy out for relentless male attention, from a young age, was a pulsating sexual magnetism. So many men desired her that she was quick to appreciate her exceptional bedroom value. It was the start of a livelihood that had Evelyn looking back on her as nothing more than ‘a beautiful strumpet’.19 She would become the kept woman of important and wealthy men, including two of the sons of Robert, Earl of Leicester.

      The first of these was twenty-four-year-old Algernon Sidney, a dashing colonel in the rebel army who had been wounded in battle, and who would later declare the execution of Charles I to be ‘the justest and bravest act … that was ever done in England, or anywhere’.20 James II would maintain that Algernon had contracted for Lucy Walter’s services with forty gold coins. Others believed her favours had cost him fifty. Either way, it was a small fortune, especially given the brevity of the affair: Sidney was suddenly sent with his regiment to bolster the garrison of Dover Castle, leaving Lucy on her own.

      Lucy then moved to the Netherlands, where she was pleased, though probably not surprised, to find herself surrounded by eligible Royalist exiles, wealthy enough to compete for the pleasure of her company. She was soon taken up by Algernon’s younger brother, Colonel Robert Sidney. He was a courtier to Prince Charles, with what was to prove the apt title of Groom of the Bedchamber: Robert was Lucy’s lover when Charles appeared in the Netherlands to prepare his ships for the expected foray against Parliament.

      Some contemporaries believed that Charles was already aware of Lucy’s charms, having glimpsed them for himself when younger: ‘Her beauty was so perfect that when the King saw her in Wales, where she was, he was … charmed and ravished and enamoured,’ a French noblewoman claimed.21 However, it was Lucy who engineered the meeting with, then the seduction of, Charles in July 1648. At this time, aged eighteen, Charles was, according to an admiring Scot, ‘One of the most gentle, innocent, well-inclined Princes, so far as yet appear, that lives in the world [with] a trim person, and a manly carriage’.22 The account of Madame de Motteville, a French courtier, largely tallies with this generous description, recalling Charles at this time as ‘well-made, with a swarthy complexion agreeing with his fine black eyes, a large ugly mouth, a graceful and dignified carriage and a fine figure’. Whatever Charles’s physical characteristics, Robert Sidney realised that it would be unwise to compete with the heady attention of his royal master, and stood aside.

      During the time the prince spent in The Hague that summer, awaiting the readiness of his fleet, Lucy became pregnant with the first of what would eventually be more than a dozen of Charles’s children by various mistresses. Their son, James, was born in Rotterdam on 9 April 1649, ten weeks after the execution of his grandfather Charles I, and nine months after the start of Charles and Lucy’s liaison. Gossips pointed out that there had been no discernible gap between the conclusion of Lucy’s relationship with Robert Sidney and the beginning of her affair with the prince, and rumours attached to Lucy’s son all his life that questioned whether he was in fact of royal blood. Charles, though, always accepted that James was his son, and publicly acknowledged the fact when giving him the title of Duke of Monmouth.

      Meanwhile a shortage of funds kept Charles’s fleet at anchor, so that his efforts to help his father’s cause in the Second Civil War largely came to nothing. When he eventually sailed, his ships harassed and captured a few lesser vessels, before squaring up to the rebel navy in the Thames estuary in August 1648. In the preparations for the battle Charles impressed his men with his insistence on sharing their danger, the courtier Sir Robert Long reporting: ‘I must not forget to tell you, the Prince behaved himself with as much gallantry and courage in this business as ever you saw; for when his lords and all the seamen came to desire him to go down into the hold, under the decks, he would not hear of it, but told them his honour was more to him than his safety; and desired them not to speak of it any more.’23

      But a last-minute storm made engagement impossible. After six fruitless weeks at sea Charles returned to The Hague in September 1648, leaving the Royalist fleet under the command of Prince Rupert of the Rhine. It seems probable that he then resumed his relationship with Lucy Walter. The scandalous liaison had taken place while Sir Edward Hyde, the adviser who sought to make the prince a worthy monarch-in-waiting, was still absent in Jersey. With his moral guardian away, Charles spent time with the more dissolute members of his mother’s entourage, including Lord Wilmot.

      Hyde would characterise Henry Wilmot as ‘A man proud and ambitious, and incapable of being contented; an orderly officer in marches and governing his troops. He drank hard, and had a great power over all who did so, which was a great [many] people.’24 Wilmot gained Charles’s friendship through their shared sense of what comprised a good time. He also won the prince’s gratitude by being a willing helper in his romance with Lucy Walter: Wilmot put his carriage at her disposal so she could travel to and from the prince’s side with ease.

      Hyde was reunited with Prince Charles at The Hague in mid-September 1648, after more than two years’ separation. He found his young protégé not only expecting to become a father, but surrounded by a court in exile that was turned in on itself in despair at the recent failure of the Second Civil War. The Scots had been crushed by Cromwell at the battle of Preston, and English resistance to the New Model Army had been firmly stamped out.

      In his first speech in the prince’s council Hyde voiced his continued deep opposition to future alliances with any powers that were hostile to the Church of England. He delivered his fatalistic view: ‘It may be God hath resolved we shall perish, and then it becomes us to perish with those decent and honest circumstances that our good fame may procure a better peace to those who succeed us than we are able to procure for them, and ourselves shall be happier than any other condition could render us.’25 Continued loss of power was, for Hyde, infinitely preferable to a sacrifice of principles. Nobody worthy of the English Crown, he believed, could lower himself to a shameful alliance with the enemies of the Anglican religion. Anyone who claimed a throne in such circumstances could only keep it for the briefest of times, before inevitable overthrow. If Charles found himself without viable foreign allies, then he must await a turn in fortunes, either through his own becoming better, or those of the rebels deteriorating. Hyde hoped that the Commonwealth’s politicians and soldiers might turn against one other, and pull the republican regime apart.

      Henrietta Maria and her supporters ridiculed Hyde for choosing to wait for miracles. They preferred to actively plot a return to royal power, and were prepared to contemplate all possible means of doing so.

      In the meantime the Royalists of both factions watched in impotent disbelief and despair during January 1649 as their king was taken to London to be tried by a hastily created court, of highly questionable credentials. Prince Charles was determined to have his father released, whatever the cost. He sent a blank sheet of paper to Charles I’s captors, to which he had applied only his signature and his seal. This ‘carte blanche’ signified that there were no terms that he would reject in return for his father’s liberty.

      When he learnt that his great gesture had failed to save his father from execution, СКАЧАТЬ