King Charles II (9 page)

It was a decision of some moment. And it dominated the Prince’s councils, as well as his correspondence from his father, for the next six months. Should the Prince of Wales be sent to friendly France – where his mother had taken refuge, and was now living at the expense of her relations with his baby sister Henriette-Anne? Or to Scotland? Or to Ireland? Or even to Denmark – where Charles had another relative on the throne?

More was at stake than Charles’ own safety. France, roughly speaking, represented the foreign Catholic interest, and the influence of Queen Henrietta Maria. Scotland stood for Presbyterianism (and therefore some kind of compromise on behalf of the Anglican King), but also for the British interest, since there it could legitimately be argued that the Prince of Wales was still on British soil. The problem of Ireland was that it was beset by so many different factions at this date, most of them represented by military forces of one size or another, that it was difficult to know whose interests would be served by the arrival there of the Prince of Wales. Perhaps distant Denmark was the best solution.

At first the King himself took the line that ‘France must be the place, not Scotland nor Denmark’.
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He dreaded making any kind of religious deal with the Scots. At the same time the King was obsessed that the Prince’s mere presence in England might scupper his own dealings with the rebels. If there was any danger of Charles falling into their hands he should proceed immediately to France, where he should place himself under his mother’s orders in absolutely everything – except religion. Should Charles be made prisoner nonetheless, he must on no account agree terms with his captors, even if the King’s own life was threatened.

But the King’s caveat about religion hardly satisfied the Council, who were frankly horrified at the idea of their Prince passing into any French Catholic hands, including those of his mother. Meanwhile there were public meetings in which the view was forcibly expressed that the Prince of Wales should not
leave British soil. Later petitions in Cornwall specifically begged him not to go to France.

Throughout the autumn the Prince’s entourage was pushed further and further west into Cornwall itself. From there it was decided to make a supreme effort to come to the relief of Exeter. Finally Charles reached Truro, on an extreme point of the peninsula.

Goring fled to France in November, to cause further trouble there. Grenville remained, to propose a scheme by which ‘poor little Cornwall’, as he termed his native region, should make a separate peace, and set up as a Royalist enclave under the Prince of Wales. The scheme, so agreeable to Grenville’s Cornish susceptibilities, was, however, doomed from the start, since the Council pointed out quickly that such negotiations implied the abdication of King Charles
I
.

By December the King changed his mind about the Prince’s refuge: Denmark was now his first choice. Once again the Council objected that the perils of reaching Denmark through winter seas, let alone the difficulty of finding a vessel to make the journey, far outweighed the advantages of that Protestant country as a refuge. Hyde remained strongly of the opinion that Scotland or Ireland (both British soil) were the obvious sites. The King began to bombard his son with letters to the contrary. The situation was further complicated by the fact that Queen Henrietta Maria herself had entered the fray. She was urgently demanding that her son should join her in France, in order to stir Cardinal Mazarin, the effective ruler of the country, to action on the King’s behalf.

As the campaign in the West reached its last stages the feared General Cromwell, the victor of Naseby, plunged into it, storming Hopton at Torrington in February. The men who flocked to the triumphant Parliamentary banners at Totnes, west of Torquay, were addressed by the great man himself. The Council hastily decided to favour a retreat to the Scilly Isles – just off the Cornish coast. Anything rather than France, was their passionately held policy. Even Jersey, so close to the coast of France but still within the British dominions, was better than a foreign country, where the Prince of Wales would incur the
double slur of being a papist and a pensionary. The King himself was becoming increasingly worried by the reckless way in which his spouse in France was prepared to sacrifice the integrity of the Church of England to gain (Presbyterian) Scottish support. He wrote off in anguish to his ‘Dear Heart’: ‘I assure thee, I put little or no difference between setting up the Presbyterian government, or submitting to the Church of Rome.’
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It was as a last throw that in January 1646 the Prince of Wales formally appointed Lord Hopton as head of the western army, with Grenville under him to command the foot. Grenville immediately and predictably refused to serve in the subordinate position. Hyde described later how Charles did all he could to try and persuade Grenville not to persist in this destructive – and self-destructive – course. But when Grenville remained obdurate, Charles was obliged to have him committed to prison. Grenville’s charismatic but perverse personality was one of the complications of Charles’ Cornish existence.

On 15 February Hopton fought the final action of the campaign at Torrington; two days later Charles with his Council took refuge at Pendennis Castle, a fastness built by Henry
VIII
two hundred feet up on the Falmouth peninsula. For a moment the Council wistfully hoped it might be safe to keep him there; but the discovery of a plot to kidnap the Prince of Wales within the castle itself clinched the matter. It was a choice between retreat and capture.

At ten o’clock at night on Monday 2 March Charles went aboard the frigate
Phoenix
from Land’s End, accompanied by Sir Edward Hyde, John Colepeper and the Earl of Berkshire. He landed at St Mary’s in the Scilly Isles on the afternoon of 4 March. It was exactly a year since he had left Oxford. Ten days later Hopton signed the articles of surrender at Exeter.

The move, although master-minded by the Council, accorded with Charles’ own desires. He too shared their reluctance to abandon the scene of action, lest he seem cowardly; but it would have been madness at this point to have ignored his father’s reiterated and fervent pleas not to prejudice the whole position of the monarchy by falling into enemy hands. He did not wish
as yet to go to France, despite Henrietta Maria’s frantic requests. The Scilly Isles constituted a
pis aller
.

But in another sense the journey itself was delightful and the consequences for Charles’ future character radical. For it was during this brief halcyon trip aboard the
Phoenix
, in the course of which the Prince insisted on taking the helm himself, that Charles discovered that joyous taste for the sea which never deserted him, and was to unite him emotionally to so many of his subjects.

‘It is no paradox to say that England hath its root in the sea,’ wrote Halifax.
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Charles discovered his own roots lay there too. The Scillies consisted of tiny islands of which St Mary, the largest, was just over two miles long; they were graced by an exceptionally balmy climate. Everything here centred on the sea. Between the Scillies and Cornwall was said to lie the vanished kingdom of Lyonesse. Over its legendary site now sailed the young Prince in a series of excursions through the spring waters.

That was the pleasant side of the picture. On the other hand conditions on land were rough, food (mainly brought from France) inadequate, and, since no-one had been expecting the little court to arrive, accommodation lamentable. With her witty and evocative pen, Ann Lady Fanshawe, wife of Charles’ secretary, described how her room was regularly dowsed by the spring tide. There was a shortage of fuel to dry themselves out. In former times her own footman would have been better lodged.
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The court, less optimistic than the young Prince, fretted at the hardships and the inaction.

In the meantime the Parliamentary privateers, like sharks, began to menace the Prince’s peace. The sea trips were curtailed. It was not long before the argument about where the Prince should now seek refuge began to rage all over again with renewed vigour. Hyde and Colepeper both voted for Jersey, still British soil. The Queen continued to advocate France. When Colepeper visited her to collect money and supplies, she pressed on him a letter full of apprehension about the Scilly Isles’ exposed position. ‘I shall not sleep in quiet until I hear that the Prince of Wales shall be removed from thence.’
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As to the danger of the sea passage to France, she had an assurance from
the French Queen that her son’s safety would be guaranteed. And was not the King himself writing to her on every possible occasion concerning the safety of the Prince of Wales?

That of course was true. The King continued to desire that his heir should be outside the sphere of danger, where Parliament might capture him and use him either as a pawn or as a hostage with which to blackmail his father. A letter from the King at Oxford, dated 22 March, began, ‘Hoping that this will find you safe with your mother …’ But it went on to say, ‘I command you upon my blessing to be constant to your religion, neither hearkening to Roman superstitions, nor the seditious and schismatical doctrines of the Presbyterians and Independents.’ On 30 March Parliament itself showed an awareness of the Prince of Wales’ potential by formally inviting him to return. Charles replied tactfully that indeed he had a great and earnest desire to be amongst them, especially if it would lead to ‘a blessed peace’.
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But he seemed to be able to keep this great and earnest desire well under control: the next month he was still lingering in the Scillies.

The King, in beleaguered Oxford, was out of contact. At the end of April he fled from Oxford to what he mistakenly believed would be the protection of the Scottish army. As a result he was still further embroiled in political intrigue, still more out of touch with his son.

It was not until 16 April that Charles set sail again, and then the destination was Jersey, not France. There was not much the Queen could do about the decision except bewail it. At least she could take comfort from the fact that Charles was now extremely near the French mainland. (Jersey is only twelve miles away at its nearest point, but fifty miles from England.)

On the journey it was the Prince of Wales who took the helm of the frigate
Proud Black Eagle
. But the arrival in Jersey seemed like a triumph for the Hyde faction. Jersey, for all its proximity to France, had been first joined to the English crown under William the Conqueror. Its governor, Sir George Carteret, came of a notable island family, but had also earned his post by a distinguished career at sea: he had been appointed to this vital naval outpost by the King in 1643. Since Jersey was now one
of the few areas of the British Isles where the royal writ ran without contest, it became the focus for loyal hopes. Perhaps the island would ‘happily’ be the means to reduce its ‘Neighbour Rebells’ by force, as a suggestion made in January had it? ‘Or at least by your example of fidelity, to turn the hearts and affections not only of them but of many others in His Majesty’s dominions …’
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To reward this fidelity, and promote it to further useful ends, the loyal islanders were granted the sight of Prince Charles dining in state. With great elegance, Charles accepted a gift of 1,500
pistoles
(that is, money) from them – ‘having not 20 in the world’. When the Prince of Wales attended church at St Helier on Sunday, 26 April, it was a brilliant and royal occasion. The church was carpeted and beflowered, every pillar decked with branches and garlands: the harvest of the Jersey spring. The beach itself was crowded as the drums beat and the colours flew. Soon Charles was able to set up a miniature court, according to the gracious tradition in which he had been raised; to the Jersiaises, as a result, he appeared ‘un Prince grandement bénin’ [benign].
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The feeling was mutual. That summer in Jersey left Charles with a particular affection for the place and its ‘cheerful good-natured people’, as Lady Fanshawe described them.
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His residence was the old Elizabeth Castle set in the fine bay of St Helier. It had been built in the reign of the great Elizabeth, on the site of an ancient monastery, but its romantic eminence might have been constructed for the court of King Arthur. It was even cut off from the main island at high tide, being reached by a causeway. The castle itself was not in a very splendid state of repair. But Charles appreciated the heady spring climate, the fine walks in the interior of the island amidst elms and oaks, in contrast to the rocky, picturesque coast.

And he was able to pursue his new passion for sailing more or less without restriction, since the Parliamentary navy was unlikely to menace him so close to the French coast (and in any case the Jersiaises themselves were much given to privateering in a jolly, uninhibited way, which discouraged callers). A boat was built at St Malo; it was gaily painted, with twelve pairs of
oars and two masts – the first of the many boats Charles would commission in a sea-mad life, a foretaste of those magnificent post-Restoration craft, the
Henrietta
, the
Monmouth
and so forth, on whose details he would lavish such care. (But it was Sir George Carteret who paid for it: Charles had not the wherewithal.)

Another pleasant aspect of that summer interlude was the relationship Charles formed with Marguerite Carteret, daughter of the Seigneur of Trinity Manor. This is Charles’ first recorded love affair and his inamorata was about twenty, four years older than himself. The setting also seems appropriate. Sex and the sea were two splendid new discoveries.

Did their summer dalliance have more serious consequences than either intended? The figure of Marguerite’s son James, occasionally claimed as Charles’ first child, has to be considered. There are certainly legends surrounding the life of James de la Cloche (the surname derived from the man Marguerite subsequently married, Jean de la Cloche). When he applied to become a Jesuit novice at Rome, de la Cloche produced mysterious letters to substantiate his claim to royal origins. The story ran that he had been kept abroad in obscurity. At the English court in the mid-1660s, the King was supposed to have told him out of the blue that he had a better title to the throne than the Duke of Monmouth, because his mother was of higher rank than Lucy Walter.
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