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

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       Royal Prey

      Indeed I think it not the least of my misfortunes that, for my sake, thou hast run so much hazard; in which thou hast expressed so much love to me, that I confess it is impossible to repay, by anything I can do, let alone words.

      Letter of Charles I to Queen Henrietta Maria, 1644

      Charles I had been judged and condemned by a court composed of his enemies. Many of them were military men who had witnessed the wars for themselves, and who had been persuaded that the king was personally responsible for the bloodshed. They tried him for this treason with no time for the formalities of kingship, referring to him as ‘Charles Stuart’, and cursing him as ‘that man of blood’. For his part, the king declined to accept the court’s authority to judge him. When he refused to plead ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ for a third time, the decision was taken away from him, and he was simply declared guilty. He was sent for beheading outside his London palace of Whitehall, on an icy day at the end of January 1649.

      The rest of the royal family also suffered terribly for its association with the king’s role in the Civil Wars. Prince Charles’s wanderings, punctuated by hopefulness and humiliation, with the enemy constantly snapping at his heels, represented just one part of the trials of the Stuart dynasty at this time.

      For all that Charles I adored his wife and doted on his children, once he had declared war on Parliament he exposed them to ever-increasing levels of personal danger. It was the taking of sides in a ferocious conflict, caused by profound political, religious and social tensions, that soon removed the princes and princesses from the supposed sanctuary of royal status. The pampered children of the years of peace became the pawns of war.

      The king and his eldest son, Charles, Prince of Wales, put on armour, and led armies against the Crown’s foes. To those who fought against the Royalists, they had chosen to step down from their majestic pedestals, and elected to become merely key enemy personnel. Their death on the battlefield could therefore be contemplated as distinctly possible. It was a short step from that thought to one of actively seeking out royal prey.

      Meanwhile the Presbyterians and Puritans who dominated the House of Commons had long viewed the French-born queen, Henrietta Maria, with suspicion and distrust. She made no attempt to conceal her zealous Roman Catholicism, and it was clear to all that she exercised considerable control over the king. Yet it was not until 1641, the year before war broke out, that she had first felt in personal danger. Accusations that she was the king’s chief evil counsellor, and talk of her possibly being impeached as a consequence, persuaded her to put in place contingency plans for escape.

      On Sunday, 16 June 1644 Queen Henrietta Maria gave birth to Princess Henrietta, her eighth and last child, in Bedford House, the finest private residence in Exeter. Henrietta would be one of six of her and King Charles I’s children to survive infancy.

      The queen had long suffered from ill health. A month earlier her doctor, Theodore de Mayerne, had judged her so fragile that he concluded ‘her days would not be many’.1 Henrietta Maria was left in such a weak state by the delivery that she felt obliged to request a favour of the enemy commander, the Earl of Essex, asking him to guarantee her safe passage to Bath, where she wished to take to the restorative mineral-rich waters. She immediately followed this with a second request, to be allowed to continue on to Bristol after her stay in Bath. Bristol was the most important English port after London, and was held by the Royalists.

      Essex could only suspect that, once she was well enough, the queen planned to set sail from Bristol and disappear overseas. He therefore replied that he would be delighted to give her safe conduct, but only if she would go to London – he pointed out that that was, after all, where the best medical advice in the country lay, and added that it would be his honour and pleasure to attend her on her journey to the capital. As for Bath or Bristol, he expressed his regret that he was unable to allow her to travel to either city without Parliament’s direction.

      Despite the exquisite sheen of the earl’s manners, the subtext was clear: Parliament would never contemplate the queen’s move to Bath or Bristol, while Essex would do what it took to bring her into his custody, where she could be detained to the advantage of the Crown’s enemies, as a highly valuable hostage to be used against the king.

      Henrietta Maria was aware that many in Parliament hated her. They correctly guessed that the French princess had only been allowed to marry their Protestant king because Pope Urban VIII wanted to ‘procure the reign of popery’ in England.2 Her attachment to her faith had been so unswerving that she had refused to take part in her and her husband’s coronation, because it would involve being crowned by a Protestant prelate. Since then she had established ornate Roman Catholic chapels in royal palaces throughout the kingdom, and had formed ties with all manner of apparently dangerous foreigners, including papal envoys. Given this bitter history between queen and Parliament, as soon as Essex refused her request to travel to Bath, Henrietta Maria contemplated her options.

      Four weeks later, feeling her health had slightly improved, the queen sailed out of Falmouth harbour for her native France. She was carried on a Flemish man-of-war that had, along with the ten vessels accompanying it, been ‘fresh tallow’d and train’d’ in order to give her the best chance of outrunning Parliament’s roving patrols. She hoped to slip through their blockade on a favourable wind, but a barge with sixteen oarsmen accompanied her ship, ready to spirit her away to safety if the weather calmed.

      On the day chosen for the voyage the wind filled the Royalists’ sails, and the queen’s flotilla sped towards Brest. A rebel frigate fired its cannon at the fleeing ships, but her shots passed wide.

      It was all very reminiscent of the queen’s arrival in Yorkshire, nearly a year and a half before, in February 1643. Henrietta Maria had spent the early months of the English Civil War in Europe, pawning and selling off her jewels in order to secure soldiers, weapons and money for her husband’s cause, at a time when Royalist supplies were dangerously low. After two attempts at crossing to England, during one of which the ship carrying her horses, grooms and coaches had sunk, she managed to land at Bridlington Bay, north of Hull. Four Parliamentary vessels had tailed her, commanded by the same William Batten who would try to capture Prince Charles on the Isles of Scilly in 1646.

      The captain of one of the rebel ships had established where the queen would be staying onshore. At four o’clock the next morning, while it was still dark, he and his comrades sailed into the bay and opened fire on Henrietta Maria’s lodgings. ‘Before I could get out of bed, the [cannon]balls were whistling upon me in such style that you may easily believe I loved not such music,’ the queen gamely wrote to her husband.3 The enemy fire killed some of her attendants, one of her sergeants being cut in two while standing just twenty feet from her. Henrietta Maria only found safety after running through the snow partially dressed, and flinging herself into a ditch that was shielded by a slight rise in the ground. She risked her life again when returning under fire to recover her lapdog, Mitte. The enemy guns blazed away at her for two hours, until a Dutch admiral who had helped escort her to Bridlington insisted that Batten’s men cease fire, or suffer the consequences.

      The Bishop of Angoulême would chastise the rebels for ‘having no respect either to [the queen’s] person, or yet to her sex … nor yet regarding her long sickness, which had brought her even within two fingers of death’.4 СКАЧАТЬ