Buch lesen: «Cavaliers and Roundheads»

PROLOGUE

‘It is called superstition nowadays for any man to come with more reverence into a church than a tinker and a dog into an ale-house.’

Archbishop Laud

On a winter’s day in 1624 Lord Kensington, England’s ‘wooing Ambassador’ as he called himself, rode into Paris to present as alluring a portrait as he could of the twenty-three-year-old Prince of Wales. Without recourse to the hyperbole which envoys on such a commission as his had commonly to employ, Kensington, himself an extremely handsome man ‘of a lovely and winning presence’, was confident that he could draw a picture sufficiently appealing to recommend the Prince as a husband for the King of France’s daughter, Henrietta Maria.

He could honestly describe a courteous young man, kind and considerate, rather delicate, even feminine in appearance, it was true, and by no means tall, no more than 5 feet 4 inches in fact, but healthy, with limbs made strong by vigorous exercise, by riding, tennis and golf, a curious Scottish game, as Kensington had to explain, which required both skill and strength in wielding a crooked club to drive balls made of hard leather stuffed with feathers into certain holes made in the ground. The Prince was meditative and studious; he read often from a little book, written out by hand and containing – though Lord Kensington had never looked closely inside it – noble sentiments and spiritual advice; he was most regular in his religious observances. Yet he was a young man of action, too, and of physical courage; he hunted with splendid spirit and took a keen interest in military affairs, having once even asked his father for permission to go off and fight in the service of the Doge of Venice. He was renowned for his temperate tastes: he had a good appetite but never ate greedily, preferring plain food to rich; he enjoyed a glass of wine or ale but never drank to excess, often, indeed, contenting himself with a glass of water or fruit juice; there had never been the least suspicion of his misbehaving with any young ladies of the English Court.

Lord Kensington took care not to emphasize this demure chastity, which seemed to some of the more uncharitable gossips in England to suggest that the Prince might be ‘less than a man’. Nor did Kensington find cause to lay too much emphasis on the solemnity of his nature, the rarity of those occasions upon which a smile of amusement lit up his small, pale, wistful face or brought a gleam of pleasure into his sad, rather prominent eyes, the even rarer occasions upon which he had been heard to laugh. There was certainly no need to mention his flashes of petulant temper, his occasional obstinacy, his disconcerting reserve, the stammer that sometimes impeded his speech, Scottish in accent like his father’s, though not so strongly so.

He had been born in Scotland on 19 November 1600, twelve miles outside Edinburgh, in a bedroom overshadowed by the great stone tower of Dunfermline Abbey. His father was King of Scotland then, and although – as the son of the Queen of England’s cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, and as the great grandson of King Henry VIII’s sister, Margaret – King James was generally accepted as the rightful heir to the English throne, Queen Elizabeth had not yet nominated him as her successor. Nor had she done so until she was on her deathbed in March 1603 when, brought the long-awaited news at Holyroodhouse, King James rode fast for the English border, followed by his lively and handsome Danish wife Anne, and accompanied by numerous courtiers and retainers who hoped to share with him some of the profits of his inheritance. Prince Charles was left in the care of nurses and servants. He was three years old by then, but he had not the strength to walk and he could not speak.

His father suggested that he might walk if his weak legs and ankles were placed in irons, and that he might perhaps talk if a surgeon were to cut the ligament at the base of his tongue. But the child’s kindly Cornish nurse warned that these drastic measures might well do more harm than good. If he were left in her care, living in the country, nature and love would do their work; and so they did. His legs admittedly were still rather bowed, his stammer was troublesome in times of stress, but he had grown, as Lord Kensington assured the French King, into a man of presence and worth. He was not as clever as his father, Kensington might have added; he did not have his father’s political judgement, though he shared to the full his belief that monarchs ruled their kingdoms by divine right, as God’s lieutenants on earth. Yet while King James was slovenly in manner, unprepossessing in appearance and argumentatively dogmatic in speech, Prince Charles was, above all, the very personification of courtliness. ‘He is grown a fine gentleman,’ one of Lord Kensing-ton’s friends observed, ‘and beyond all expectation I had of him when I saw him last; and, indeed, I think he never looked nor became himself better in all his life.’ In earlier years he had occasionally revealed his jealousy of his elder brother, Prince Henry, a clever, handsome, athletic boy, their mother’s favourite, but this paragon had died at the age of eighteen twelve years before; and Prince Charles was now the undisputed heir to the English throne.

Complimentary as were the reports which Lord Kensington gave of the Prince of Wales in Paris, they were no more enthusiastic than those he sent back to London about the fourteen-year-old Princess, ‘the loveliest creature in France and the sweetest thing in nature’. She was certainly too vivacious to be considered plain; her face, always expressive of some emotion, of excitement, sorrow, happiness or anger, was appealing in its responsiveness and childish candour; yet it had to be admitted that, for all Lord Kensington’s excited pronouncements, she was no great beauty. Her eyes, so most of her portraits seem to suggest, were hooded by heavy lids; her upper lip, as even Van Dyck was to indicate, was noticeably protuberant in consequence of her projecting teeth. Her complexion was sallow; she was so small that the fringe of tight, black rings of hair that framed her face would scarcely reach her intended bridegroom’s shoulder. She walked about her rooms with the quick, sudden movements of a sparrow; she spoke quickly, too, and had a quick temper. She was a determined and uncompromising Roman Catholic.

Her marriage was celebrated on a platform outside the west door of Notre-Dame on May Day 1625, the duc de Chevreuse standing in for the absent Protestant bridegroom to whom he was distantly related. The next month at Canterbury her second wedding took place. Her father-in-law had died some weeks before on 27 March, so her husband was now King Charles and she was the Queen of England.

The people of London were ready to welcome her as such. Two days after her wedding she and her husband set out by barge from Gravesend followed by hundreds of boats whose numbers grew ever greater as they approached the roaring cannon of the Tower. The King and Queen, both dressed in green, stood by the open windows of the barge, bowing and waving to the cheering crowds. All the way from the Tower to Somerset House in the Strand, which was to be the new Queen’s London home, the cheering and shouting continued as the crowds of people jostled each other on the riverside stairs, peered down from the windows of the buildings on London Bridge upon the royal barge, clung to the sides of the surrounding boats.

The people’s enthusiasm for their young Queen Henrietta Maria did not, however, last long. It was soon noticed that she responded to their acclamations, if at all, with a sulky ill grace. When they crowded round her and stared at her, she turned away or even scowled at them. Particularly she disliked being watched with gaping curiosity when she had her meals at Whitehall Palace. ‘Divers of us being at Whitehall to see her being at dinner,’ reported one of the sightseers traditionally admitted to this intriguing spectacle, ‘and the room somewhat overheated with a fire and company, she drove us all out of the chamber. I suppose none but a Queen could have cast such a scowl.’

She took no trouble to learn English; she showed no inclination to talk to anyone except the French women who constantly surrounded her; she even refused to attend her husband’s coronation, choosing instead to peer down on the King from a window in Old Palace Yard as, under a dark and threatening sky, wearing white, not purple – the robes of innocence rather than of majesty – he walked towards the Abbey accompanied by his dear friend, the Duke of Buckingham.

It was only too clear that the Queen disliked England and the English people, that in particular she disliked the Duke of Buckingham, who patronizingly treated her as though she were a little inexperienced girl in need of his worldly advice, and that she shrank from a husband whom she could not yet begin to understand or even to like. Unhappy and homesick, she took a perverse pleasure in being so obviously a foreigner, in flaunting her Catholicism in the face of Protestant susceptibility.

Her husband’s reaction to her pert, combative and sometimes almost hysterical self-will, was a cold disapproving silence, occasionally broken by sudden flashes of rage. He complained to Buckingham of ‘all her various neglects’, the way she tried to avoid being alone with him, how he had to communicate with her through a servant.

Convinced that the cause of the unhappiness of his marriage was the ‘maliciousness’ of her French attendants, the King – who had conceived an aversion to foreigners which was never entirely to leave him – determined to be rid of them and, on the afternoon of 26 June 1626, accompanied by the Duke of Buckingham, he walked into the Queen’s room at Whitehall Palace. Her attendants watched in awed silence as he sharply told her to come outside with him for a moment. The Queen replied that if he had anything to say to her he could do so where they were. Angrily he took hold of her hand, pulled her after him to his own apartments, pushed her inside, locked the door and told her that he had had quite enough of her French friends: all of them were to be sent home. She burst into tears, then fell to her knees in supplication, then, losing her temper, ran to the window, smashed her fist through the glass and began to shout to the people gathered in the courtyard below. The King pulled her back, bruising her hands and tearing her dress.

The King’s unhappy marriage was but the most personal of the depressing problems that faced him on every side. The country had drifted into a war with Spain which dragged on for four years; and, before it was over, England was at war also with France. Then, in the summer of 1626, the Duke of Buckingham as Lord High Admiral led a disastrous expedition to relieve Huguenot rebels in La Rochelle who were being besieged there by the Catholic forces of the French King. The Duke brought his badly mauled army back to Plymouth ‘with no little dishonour to our nation, excessive charge to our treasure, and great slaughter of our men’. Distressed as he was by foreign affairs, the King was as deeply troubled by affairs at home.

His father had never disguised his impatience with Parliament, or rather with the country gentry, professional men and merchants who constituted the House of Commons. After dissolving one particularly difficult assembly, the so-called Addled Parliament of 1614, King James had declared that he was surprised that his ‘ancestors should have permitted such an institution to come into existence’. He could not govern indefinitely without Parliament, since he needed the money that only Parliament could provide; but he had always been insistent that the Commons had no right to question his policies, to interfere with his inherited prerogative powers. These privileges depended upon him, he had told the Speaker, denying that the Commons had any business meddling with matters of state; and when they had entered in their journal a protestation that their privileges did not depend upon the King but were the ‘ancient and undoubted birthright of the subjects of England’, he had dissolved Parliament, torn the protestation from the book with his own hand and ordered the arrest of those Members whom he took to be the troublemakers. Yet persistently as King James had maintained that his powers were absolute, laboriously as he had set them out in treatises on the Divine Right of Kings, regularly as he had informed Parliament that he was outside or above the law, he was shrewd enough never to lay claims to authority which the laws of the country or the Church of England would have good cause to deny him. Although he had frequently declared his belief that he had no duty to communicate with Parliament at all unless he wished to do so, in practice he had been in almost constant communication with it whenever it was sitting. His relations with the Commons, while often strained, had never reached breaking point; indeed, with the last of his Parliaments they had been perfectly agreeable.

His son had been brought up in the belief, as propounded in a little manual, Basilikon Doron, which King James had written for him, that kings, like fathers, derived their authority from God and from Him also derived their right to demand obedience and honour. A few months before his accession Charles had heard his father tell Parliament – and he himself clung resolutely to the belief throughout his life – that the King of England sat on Jesus’s throne on ‘this part of the earth’.

But Charles was neither so shrewd as his father nor so wary; he did not appreciate just how possessively Parliament regarded its right to approve taxation. He affronted Parliament by virtually ignoring it. Whereas it had been his father’s practice to make long speeches to both Houses, to send them frequent messages, to remind them constantly of his theory of kingship, he himself addressed them in the briefest, curtest way. He left them in no doubt that he regarded it as Parliament’s duty, as it was all his subjects’ duty, to recognize his absolute authority, to trust him to do what was best for them of his own goodwill. Miserable in his marriage to an unhappy and highly-excitable wife, dependent upon the wayward advice of the volatile and forceful Duke of Buckingham, he seemed driven by a nervous insecurity and sense of personal inadequacy to arrogate to himself privileges and rights which his father would never have claimed. ‘This King,’ wrote Lucy Hutchinson, daughter of the Lieutenant of the Tower of London and wife of a Nottinghamshire gentleman, ‘was a most excellent judge and a greate lover of paintings, carvings, gravings and many other ingenuities .…But a worse encroacher upon the civill and spirituall liberties of his people by farre than his father.’ Grave, reserved and fastidious as was his usual demeanour, those close to Charles learned to beware of the sudden outbursts of anger which erupted when he felt his authority or dignity questioned, to dread the obstinacy which was to bring about his downfall.