With Milton and the cavaliers

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. Charles I i

II. Oliver Cromwell 38

Chapter I

There is, perhaps, no sadder career in the whole of English history than that of Charles I.

The very designations by which he is known, mark, by their varying character, the changes through which he passed.

He was Baby Charles, he was Charles I., and the White King-so styled by Lilly the Astrologerthen he became merely "the man Charles Stuart," at least in the mouths of many; and now, among those who look only on one side of the picture, he lives in memory always as Charles the Martyr.

Between the first fond foolish name, given by his eccentric but indulgent father, and the last mournful appellation, yawns a gulf which represents a complete change in the English Monarchy. At the very names Baby Charles, and Steenie, there rises before us the picture of Scottish James,'

and his quaint surroundings, that mixture of homeliness and pedantry which he had brought with him from the North, and which harmonised so ill with the still existing splendours of the Court of his great predecessor.

The picture is not dignified, but it is pleasant ; we watch the kindly, shrewd, ungainly King, clad in his padded dagger-proof suit, alternately spouting " Dog-Latin," and bad English quotations, or haggling with reluctant tradesmen over the price of their merchandise ; and, later on, we see him again as the " dear dad " of Buckingham, encouraging his familiarities, addressing Lord Salisbury as his " Little Beagle," and his son and Buckingham together as his tl sweet babes."

And yet, through all the pedantry and extravagance of his letters breathes the spirit of shrewd common sense, which kept his dominions in a state of tranquillity. Men at the time may have called his rule inglorious, but the strength of it they only fully realised when the sceptre passed into Charles' hand.

Born in Scotland, at Dunfermline, on November 19th, 1600, Charles yet possessed little trace of Scottish origin in his character. As a child he was so weak and ailing that it was no easy task to find a noble lady willing to undertake the responsibility of rearing him. His legs were so feeble that he crawled like a baby until he was nearly seven years old, and besides being very backward in his speech, he had some impediment which he never quite surmounted. His life would probably have been a happy and contented one had his cheery elder brother, Prince Henry, lived to keep him from becoming a king, and to make him in reality, what he promised to do at one time as they played together, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

A strong affection existed between the two brothers, which shows through the somewhat forced style of composition in an early letter sent by the little Prince Charles, then nine years old, to his elder brother, and which runs thus : —

" Nothing can be more agreeable to me, dearest brother, than your return to us ; for to enjoy your company, to ride with you, to hunt with you, will yield to me supreme pleasure. I am now reading the ' Conversations of Erasmus,' from which I am sure I can learn both the purity of the Latin tongue and elegance of behaviour. Farewell ! Your Highness's most loving brother,

Charles Duke of York and Albany."

The Dukedom of York was conferred on the little Prince in January 1605, before he was five years old, and he was crowned with a golden circlet, and a little sword was buckled to his side ; as he was beginning to gain strength now, he may have been boyish enough to enjoy its possession. But his love for manly sport, in his early years at least, was less for its own sake than through his affection for his sturdier brother, to whom he writes again : —

" Sweet, sweet Brother, — I thank you for your letter. I will keep it better than all my graith ; and I will send my pistols by Master Newton " (Prince Henry's tutor). " I will give anything that I have to you ; both my horses, and my books, and my pieces, and my cross-bows, or anything that you would have. Good brother, love me, and I shall ever love and serve you. — Your loving brother to be commanded, York."

And another letter runs : —

"Good Brother, — I hope you are in good health and merry, as I am, God be thanked. In your absence I visit sometimes your stable and ride your great horses, that at your return I may wait on you in that noble exercise. So committing you to God, I rest, Your loving and dutiful brother,

" York,"

Of his more serious pursuits he writes to his father in early days : —

" Sweet, sweet Father, — i learn to decline substantives and adjectives. Give me your blessing.

H '\ thank you for my best man. — Your loving son, York."

And in an early letter to his mother, Queen Anne, we find one of the few allusions this ascetic prince ever made to " creature comforts." He deplores her sufferings from the gout, "the which," he writes, " I must bear the more patiently, because it is the sign of a long life." And he goes on to say that he must bewail her illness for many causes; "and specially because it is troublesome to you, and has deprived me of your most comfortable sight, and of many good dinners, the which I hope, by God's grace, shortly to enjoy."

Childhood at that time, and especially royal childhood, was soon over ; and Prince Charles' ended prematurely just before his twelfth birthday, when his position was changed to one of heavy responsibility by the death of his elder brother. Henceforth he became heir to the kingdoms of England and Scotland.

His was a nature peculiarly ill-fitted to rule.

Grave, reserved, and dignified, with a patient sweetness of disposition which no ill-treatment could sour, and a lofty purity of life which not even the lax morality of his time could affect ; he yet lacked most of the qualities which go to make a leader among men. He had narrow sympathies, and an inherent love of crooked ways, and his belief in the Divine Right of Kings was the source of all his troubles. England had passed beyond the day when " the King could do no wrong," and Charles I. was the last man to bring back such a state of things. We need only study the condition, at the time of his accession, of the two kingdoms over which he was called to reign, to see that he needed most that which he most fatally lacked, the qualities of uprightness and strength.

His understanding was narrow, and he had rendered his sympathies still narrower by the style of his reading and his friends. What he needed to learn, and what he never learned to the day of his death, was the power of the English people ; that which Queen Elizabeth had understood always, and in which her strength had lain, and that in which lay the strength too of England's latest Queen, Victoria.

A curious foretaste of Charles' attitude towards the Commons is found in a letter to Buckingham, before he was twenty-one, in which he writes : —

"The Lower House this day has been a little unruly ; but I hope it will turn to the best ; for, before they rose, they began to be ashamed of it. Yet I could wish that the King would send down a commission here, that (if need were) such seditious fellows might be made an example to others, by Monday next, and till then I would let them alone. It will be seen whether they mean to do good, or to persist in their follies ; so that the King needs to be patient but a little while. I have spoken with so many of the council, as the King trusts most, and they are all of his mind, only the sending of authority to set seditious fellows fast is of my adding."

The last sentence is significant of the prince's future attitude towards his own Parliament !

As has so often been the case, Charles' natural defects as a ruler were further aggravated by his choice of a bride.

In February, 1623, he had with difficulty obtained his father's leave to go incognito to the court of Spain, accompanied by the King's favourite, Buckingham, for the purpose of negotiating a marriage with the Infanta of Spain.

The expedition was one of continual trials, beginning with that of a bad sea-passage, of which Buckingham writes to King James, " The first that fell sick was your son, and he that continued it longest was myself."

For a time the Spanish marriage seemed likely to be arranged. Of course, the difference of religion between the two was a matter of difficulty, but Charles received a friendly letter from the Pope himself, which he answered at great length : the last sentence reads almost as a prophecy. "Be your holiness persuaded that I am and ever shall be of such moderation as to keep aloof, as far as possible, from every undertaking which may testify any hatred towards the Roman Catholic religion ; nay, rather I will seize all opportunities by a gentle and generous mode of conduct to remove all sinister suspicions entirely ; so that, as we all confess one undivided Trinity and one Christ crucified, we may be banded together unanimously into one faith. That I may accomplish this, I will reckon as trifling all my labours and vigilance, and even the hazards of kingdoms, and life itself."

But the marriage did not take place. The Spanish princess had contemplated the conversion of Charles, and consequent privileges for the English Roman Catholics ; she did not allow her suitor to converse with her except in public, and he lingered on in Madrid becoming more and more dissatisfied at the state of affairs, until he finally returned home in anger, and the negotiations for the marriage were broken off.

Soon after this came the death of James I. and Charles' accession to the throne. The joy with which his Protestant subjects had seen the failure of his attempt to win the Infanta as his bride was soon damped by his marriage with another Roman Catholic princess, Henrietta Maria, the sister of the French king and the youngest daughter of the famous Henri IV. She was not sixteen at the time of her marriage by proxy in Paris, and she then came over to England, with a large retinue of priests and attendants, and escorted by Buckingham, who had been sent over to Paris for that purpose. She met her young husband at Dover, whither he had come to welcome her ; she was evidently no better a sailor than he, for she sent to him a request to delay his arrival at Dover until the day after her own, so as to give her time to recover from the "green sickness."

Henrietta Maria was a little slender, black-eyed maiden of fifteen; brown-haired, dark-skinned, graceful and vivacious. She had been bred up according to the French fashion of the time, with io WITH MILTON AND THE CAVALIERS

elegant accomplishments, such as dancing, singing, and acting, but with no training at all in the more serious subjects of education, which might have helped her to understand something about the people among whom she now came to dwell. She had been educated as a devoted Catholic, and she came to her kingdom surrounded with zealous ecclesiastics of her own faith, whose ministrations and prohibitions were a source of trouble between her and her husband from the beginning of their union.

When her mother, Mary de Medici, had parted with her at Amiens, she had given her a letter of advice and exhortation which, while signed and written by her, was in reality the work of Cardinal Richelieu. In this letter breathes the spirit which aggravated so many of the difficulties between the royal pair and their subjects. The young queen is not only urged to be firm and zealous in her own religion, like her great ancestor, St. Louis, but to pray daily, and have special prayers made, that her husband too might be drawn into the true religion. In the light of modern history, it is a little startling to find Henrietta being told that Mary Queen of Scots, her husband's grandmother, is filled in heaven with this great wish for her grandchild.

CHARLES I. ii

Animated by such instructions, and with nothing but an uneducated girl's sharp shallow nature to help her, it was not much wonder that the poor child soon grew up into a mischievous intriguer.

Her meeting with Charles at Dover was most affectionate ; she kneeled and kissed his hand, and he lifted the small figure in his arms and kissed her many times. Later in the day he, having already dined, carved for her at her first dinner on English soil, for in her storm-tossed condition the previous evening she had probably eaten little.

Venison and pheasant were served, and the Queen partook of both, though warned by her confessor that it was a fast-day, and from this little incident her Protestant subjects formed the erroneous belief that she would soon join the faith of her husband.

A letter written at the time gives a good account of their reception in London, whither they journeyed leisurely vid Canterbury and Gravesend, and there embarked on the royal barge.

"The last night at five o'clock, there being a very great shower, the King and Queen in the royal barge, with many other barges of honour, and thousands of boats, passed through London Bridge to Whitehall ; infinite numbers, besides these, in wherries, standing in houses, ships, lighters, western barges, and on each side of the shore. Fifty good ships discharging their ordnance as their majesties passed along by ; as, last of all, the Tower did such a peal, as I believe she never before heard the like. The King and Queen were both in green suits. The barge windows, notwithstanding the vehement shower, were open, and all the people shouting amain. She put out her hand and shaked it unto them. She hath already given some good signs of hope that she may ere long, by God's blessing, become ours in religion."

And another contemporary account says : " Yesterday I saw them coming up from Gravesend, and never beheld the King to look so merrily. In stature, her head reached to his shoulder ; but she is young enough to grow taller. . . . 'Twixt Gravesend and London she had the beautiful and stately view of part of our Navy that is to go to sea, which gave her a volley of fifteen hundred great shot. So they arrived at Whitehall, where they continue till Monday, when they go to Hampton Court. On Sunday there is a great feast at Whitehall."

It is pleasant to think that there were some bright days at the beginning of the marriage

Walker &■ Cccktrell

Charles I.

After Van Dyck. In the National Portrait Gallery.

which was to end in such tragic gloom, and that its early days at least were welcomed with as brave a show as graced even some of the progresses of Elizabeth.

But misunderstandings arose almost immediately, and for them two causes seemed specially to blame : on the Queen's side, the fact of her being an instrument in the hands of powerful alien advisers, and on the King's, that he poured all his conjugal differences of the most minute kind into the ears of his favourite, Buckingham. Can anything better illustrate how near a quarrel they were than the fact of such passages as the following occurring in Charles' letters to the Duke before he had been married much more than a year ?

"At my first meeting of her at Dover, I could not expect more testimonies of respect and love than she showed ; as, to give one instance. Her first suit was, that she being young, and coming to a strange country, both by her years and ignorance of the customs of the place, might commit many errors ; therefore, that I would not be angry with her for her faults of ignorance, before I had, by my instructions, learned her to eschew them ; and desired me, in these cases, to use no third person, but to tell her myself, when I found she did anything amiss. I both granted her request and thanked her for it ; but desired that she would use me as she had desired me to use her; which she willingly promised me, which promise she never kept."

The use of a " third person " in their intercourse seems to have been one of their mistakes from the beginning. And can we wonder that when Charles, as he writes to Buckingham, sends " some of my council to her with those orders that were kept in the queen my mother's house, desiring she would command the Count of Tilliers that the same might be kept in hers," the prompt reply comes back from his wife that "she hoped I would give her leave to order her house as she list herself." Surely here is a strong instance in a trifling matter of Charles' most fatal defect, his want of insight into the character of others, for what could be more trying to a young wife than to have "orders" sent her to keep her house by the pattern — however good — of her mother-in-law ?

Charles' letter to Buckingham goes on to tell of his surprise at her conduct, and that he " took a time, when I thought we had both best leisure to dispute it, to tell her calmly both her fault in the public denial and her mistaking the business itself. She, instead of acknowledging her fault and mistaking, gave me so ill an answer that I omit (not to be tedious) the relation of that discourse." It is easy to imagine the nature of the "ill answer" given to her husband's "calm telling" of her fault.

The constant difficulties between the royal pair were generally at first connected with the members of the Queen's private household ; and it must have been no easy matter to live peaceably while the King's household was Protestant and the Queen's Roman Catholic : the very chaplains were rivals, in a most unseemly way.

On one occasion, as Charles and his wife were about to dine, and the King's chaplain began to say grace, the Queen's confessor, standing beside him, raised his voice in a loud Latin benediction. The chaplain pushed his brother cleric on one side, and with great energy finished his performance, while the King hastened to draw one of the dishes towards him, and made a sign that dinner was to begin. But the two ecclesiastics evidently nursed their wrath while the meal proceeded, for no sooner was it at an end than such an unseemly duet between the two began that Charles led his wife from the room in displeasure, and left them to finish alone.

It was impossible that two such households should dwell together with any sort of comfort, and especially as every penance exacted from the Queen by her confessors was, as it were, a "red rag" to her Protestant subjects. Her clerical advisers most unwisely sent her to walk barefoot to the spot in Tyburn where the traitors concerned in the Gunpowder Plot had been executed, and this act, of course, raised a storm of indignation throughout London and elsewhere.

Nor was the King's own conduct such as to smooth matters between the two religious parties. On his first speech in Parliament, when, according to his belief in the Divine Right of Kings, which in the end cost him his throne, he wore his crown before his coronation, a contemporary writer tells us that "before he would enter into the business he caused a Bishop to say prayers ; before the beginning whereof he made the doors suddenly to be shutt, and so enforced the Popish Lords to be present ; some whereof kneeled down, some stood upright, and one did nothing but crosse himself."

Religious matters in the royal household seemed in such a state of unseemly rivalry that, even in the Chapel Royal, a Roman Catholic nobleman is described as "praying on purpose louder than the chaplain prayed," and receiving, after a time, from the King himself, the angry message, "either let him come and do as we do, or I will make him prate further off."

On February 2nd, 1626, the coronation took place in Westminster Abbey, but the Queen declined to take part in it, and watched the procession from her windows, while her ladies, we are told, " frisked and danced in the room " around her.

The procession gathered in Westminster Hall, and thence proceeded to the church ; the Archbishop then presented Charles, bareheaded, to the people. He was crowned, clad in a crimson shirt, and anointed ; and then, having received the Communion, he ascended the throne in his purple robes, and received the homage of all his peers.

From the first the difficulties with the Queen's Roman Catholic retinue were many, and time seemed only to increase them ; so that Charles, after more than a year's discomfort, resolved to dismiss the whole body.

It was a large household, ranging, besides the clergy, who were the cause of so much dissension, from governesses, maids-of-honour, and gentlemenushers to yeomen of the pantry, pages of the robes,

and " children " and " scowrers " of the kitchen.

B

The King softened their dismissal by large gifts of money ; the very " children of the kitchen " were to receive ^20 apiece, and " Madam Nurse and her husband" .£1000 between them, although she was eventually allowed to remain with her mistress, besides one "that hath used to dresse her," and "some douzen others of the inferior sorte, as bakers, cooks," &c.

There was some little difficulty in the final despatch of the French party, who refused to leave without special order from the King; the Bishop especially, as a contemporary expresses it, standing '* upon his punctilios." However, the same writer goes on to describe how the matter was settled by the King sending a Captain of the Guard with yeomen, heralds, and trumpeters, first to proclaim his Majesty's pleasure at the gate of Somerset House, and then, if there were any further delay, "to put it in execution, by turning all the French out of Somerset House by head and shoulders, and shutting the gate after them." " Which news," he adds, "so soon as the French heard, their courage came downe, and they yielded to be gone the next tyde.

"The time being come, my Lord Conway, Mr. Treasurer, and Mr. Comptroller went to see them performe their promise, and brought the Bishop out of the gate to the boot of his coach, where he, making a stand, told them he had one favour more to crave at their hands, namely, that they would permit him to stay till the midnight- tide, to the ende he might go away private and coole, which was not denyed him."

The Bishop naturally feared an expression of public opinion if the party were openly driven forth all together in the daylight ; only one French priest was left with the young Queen, and he described as " the silliest of them all," and so hostile was the general feeling that the very housekeeper at St. James', when bidden to prepare for another visitor at once, sends word to the King that "the French had so defiled that House, as a week's worke would not make it cleane."

So on August 7th, 1626, a year and a half after his marriage, Charles wrote to the Duke of Buckingham, " I command you send all the French away to-morrow out of the town." That simple sentence is more to his credit than the rest of the letter, which runs : " If you can, by fair means (but stick not long in disputing), otherwise force them away ; driving them away like so many wild beasts, until ye have shipped them ; and so the devil go with them ! "

This act certainly led to greater harmony between Charles and the Queen, so that he writes to the Duke rather more than a year later : " I cannot omit to tell you that my wife and I were never better together ; she . . . showing herself so loving to me by her discretion upon all occasions, that it makes us all wonder and esteem her."

But, in such alien surroundings, the young lightminded and uneducated Queen was developing into an unwise intriguer, the very worst adviser for her husband in his position.

Her temper was such that a contemporary writes : " She seems of a more than ordinary resolution. With one frown, divers of us being at Whitehall to see her (being at dinner, and the room somewhat overheated with the fire and company), she drave us all out of the chamber. I suppose none but a Queen could cast such a scowl."

The King's affection for his wife was deep and lasting, and he seemed soon to reconcile her to the loss of her French household, but her want of those qualities in which he was himself most lacking, prevented her having any influence over him for good.

Young and uneducated as she was, and bred up under an absolute monarchy such as Richelieu had made that of France, her one idea was to urge her husband to acts of more and more absolute despotism.

The political history of their reign is one of the most interesting of our country, but it cannot here be fully discussed.

From the year 1628, when Charles bound himself by his signature to keep the Petition of Right, which was a recapitulation of John's Magna Carta, until the morning of January 30th, 1649, when he stepped out of his palace window to meet his death at the hands of his own people, his life is one sad series of broken promises and fatal mistakes.

The only way in which it might have been possible to stave off a revolution would have been for Charles to make himself an absolute monarch, but he had neither the strength nor the ability for such a position. He could never make a decision rapidly, and he hesitated over every course of action in a manner most fatal to a leader ; and, worst of all, his belief in his own Divine Right as king prevented him from considering as binding the promises made to his subjects. He was not clear-headed, and in each crisis in the Civil War between himself and his Parliament he failed to understand his own position, and so continually aggravated the evils which existed.

In 1628 he lost his old friend the Duke of Buckingham, who was stabbed at Portsmouth by Felton, a fanatical soldier, for the sake of a private grudge, and neither Strafford nor Archbishop Laud, who henceforth became the King's chief advisers, were men calculated to widen his sympathies.

For eleven years no Parliament was summoned, and the money which Charles needed was raised by taxes such as the Petition of Right had rendered illegal.

The spirit of Puritanism was growing throughout the land, and the policy of Laud tended but to increase it.

He and Charles were alike high-minded lofty Churchmen, with a true and deep spirit of devotion to their faith, but it was a cruel fate which made them rulers in England at a time when tolerance, insight into human nature, and wide sympathies were the first requisites in those who would govern by peace.

Strafford was sent as Lord Deputy to Ireland, and carried out his high-handed measures in such a way as to bring about external order at least in that unfortunate country, but little permanent good was effected ; discontent smouldered below the surface, ready always to break out into open rebellion. Laud, too, had carried his labours out of England, and had raised a storm of indignation in Scotland by imposing a Liturgy on the Church there, and in 1638 the National Covenant was signed in Scotland by men of all classes.

Two years later Charles was forced to summon a Parliament, but neither from it, nor from the Council he called at York, could he get the supplies he needed, so in November 1640 he summoned his famous Long Parliament.

Tragic events now followed closely on one another ; the Commons' belief in Strafford and Laud as the King's most dangerous advisers led to the impeachment of both, the execution of Strafford, and the imprisonment of Laud. Then came the Grand Remonstrance, and Charles' most fatal mistake, that of impeaching the five members for joining with the Covenanters against him. The five members were Pym, Hampden, Haselrig, Hollis, and Strode.

The King went in person to the House to demand the impeachment, and as he " stepped through the door which none of his predecessors had ever passed," so writes Gardiner, " he was, little as he thought it, formally acknowledging that power had passed into new hands. The revolution which his shrewd father had descried when he bade his attendants to set stools for the deputies of the Commons as for the ambassadors of a king, was now a reality before him. He had come to the Commons because they would no longer come to him." But Charles understood nothing of the significance of the occasion ; " in his eyes," says Gardiner, " there was visible no more than a mortal duel between King Charles and King Pym."