The King's Revenge (8 page)

The man who sent this report, Henry Parker, was secretary to the English Merchant Adventurers in Hamburg. He had been a successful
propagandist for the parliamentary side during the Civil Wars and was one of the editors of
The King’s Cabinet Revealed
, the selection of Charles’s letters sensationally published after they were captured at the Battle of Naseby.

Parker had arrived in Hamburg at about the same time as a significant royalist agent. Sir John Cochrane was Parker’s complete
opposite in nature and deed. Whereas the latter was an urbane lawyer with a noted writing style, Cochrane was a Scottish professional
soldier whose persuasive technique was that of the thug. He lost no time in setting out to intimidate the English merchants
in the hope of turning their support – and ships – away from the revolutionary cause. He showed little sensitivity in selecting
his targets and even attempted to have the chaplain to the English congregation shot. Parker described the event in an intelligence
briefing:

Charles was desperate for both men and money and instructed his
continental agents to raise cash by whatever means. One scheme involving Cochrane entailed raising money by kidnapping English
merchants and holding them to ransom. At the town of Pinneberg, eighteen kilometres from Hamburg, the kidnappers succeeded
in luring three merchants on board a ship with the intention of taking them off and demanding £30,000 for their safe return.
After seizing their victims, the kidnappers did not act quickly enough and the merchants raised a troop of two hundred musketeers
in a successful rescue bid.
²²

By April, Henry Parker had been recalled home, having been an agent in Hamburg since 1646. His replacement was Richard Bradshaw,
a relative of John Bradshaw, who had presided over the court that tried the king and was now president of the ruling Council
of State. In early May, a plot to kill the younger Bradshaw was uncovered before any harm was done. For fear of being assassinated
in the streets, Bradshaw became a virtual prisoner in his home. He complained that the city fathers did little to deal with
those hell-bent on doing away with him. Despite his fears, he survived.

In The Hague, tensions were even higher due to the presence of Charles himself. Royalist exiles ranged from hot-headed young
Cavaliers, who maintained their allegiance to Charles undimmed, to former royal advisors and civil servants such as Edward
Hyde and Sir Edward Nicholas. The cult of Charles I as the martyred king was well established on the Continent. By now, editions
of
Eikon Basilike
were circulating in English, Latin, Dutch and German. In a sermon preached before Charles II, Dr Richard Watson spoke of
‘the everlasting stupendous monument of a book raised higher than the pyramids of Egypt in the strength of language and well
proportioned expression’.

When word reached the city in early 1649 that Sir Isaac Dorislaus, the Dutch lawyer who had played such a central role in
drawing up the charges against the king, was being sent as a parliamentary emissary, the blood in many a young royalist’s
veins reached boiling point. One man in the city could provide direction for all this boiling blood.
The Marquis of Montrose, a Scottish aristocrat and general who had fought bravely for Charles I in Scotland against the Covenanters,
^*
was an exile like the rest – but he was an exile who would never give up. When he heard the news of the king’s death, he
is said to have fainted. On recovering, ‘he vowed to devote himself exclusively to revenge the murder of his beloved master;
and, to give solemnity to his vow, and at the same time expression to his grief, he retired to a private chamber, where he
spent two days, without permitting a living being to see or speak to him.’
²³
Montrose then wrote to Charles’s widow that he would revenge the king, whose epitaph he would write ‘with blood and wounds’.
²⁴
If any man would know how to choose a target and organise a band of men to attack it, it was Montrose.

The men he selected for the job were no run-of-the-mill heavies who could be hired for a few shillings to do any rough deed.
Montrose hand-picked members of the Scottish establishment who had followed him into exile. Sir John Spottiswood had been
a gentleman of the bedchamber to James I and was the son of the former Archbishop of St Andrews and Primate of Scotland. Colonel
Walter Whitford was the son of the Bishop of Brechin who had backed the reforms instigated by Archbishop Laud. The others
were all former Cavaliers.

Dorislaus arrived in his native city in April. Together with Walter Strickland, the long-serving parliamentary ambassador
to the Dutch United Provinces, he was to open negotiations for an alliance with London. The Hague was neither safe nor welcoming.
It harboured large numbers of well-armed English and Scottish royalists who held a serious grudge against the Dutch academic.
The Commonwealth government should have known better than to send him. Dorislaus should have known better than to go.

On 29 April he set up lodgings at an inn called the Witte Zwaan
(White Swan). Rumours reached Strickland that a gang of assassins was planning to kill the middle-aged scholar. They had been
boasting about it around the town. Strickland sent a note to Dorislaus, advising him to move to a private house where he could
be better protected.
²⁵
Dorislaus stubbornly stayed put at the inn, though he did postpone a journey across the town to visit Strickland. The following
day, 1 May, an attempt was made on his life, but he escaped.

The day after, doing his best to protect his naive colleague, Strickland made the journey across town to visit Dorislaus at
his lodgings. That evening, he left Dorislaus about to eat his supper and went home for his own. An hour later, a group of
between six and twelve armed men entered the inn. Thanks to effective groundwork, they knew the location of Dorislaus’s rooms.
As they ran along the corridor with swords and pistols drawn, servants called out ‘Murder’. Hearing the shouts, the servants
attending Dorislaus rushed to the door and put their weight against it. The doctor looked for another way out, but finding
none, decided he should accept his fate. According to his servants, ‘he returned to his chair, and folding his arms, leant
upon it, with his face towards the door’.
²⁶

The assassins pushed their way in to find Dorislaus sitting composed and looking them in the eye. His unarmed servants were
pushed back and had pistols and swords held to their chests. Walter Whitford ran forwards and slashed Dorislaus across the
head with his sword before running him through his body. The rest of the gang then thrust their swords into the dying man’s
body.
²⁷
As they ran off, they shouted, ‘Thus dies one of the king’s judges.’

It was a miserable end to the life of a scholar, lawyer and diplomat; one who had been educated at Leiden University, was
an expert on ancient Roman history, and had held the first professorship in ancient history at the University of Cambridge.
It was a shoddy beginning to Charles’s vow of vengeance upon those who had killed his father. There is, of course, no denying
that Dorislaus was foolhardy to take up the post in The Hague. As one Venetian
diplomat summed it up, ‘he had the audacity to betake himself to Holland where the king’s son was.’
²⁸
Strickland, though fearing he was the assassins’ next target, arranged for his colleague’s body to be transported to England,
where he was buried in Westminster Abbey after a state funeral.
²⁹
His son and daughters were awarded pensions.

Following the assassination, Whitford escaped across the border into the Spanish-held Netherlands with the help of the Portuguese
ambassador, who was in on the plot. He lived on to receive not one but two royal pensions. Spottiswood was less lucky: he
was executed following the doomed campaign in Scotland led by Montrose for Charles II the following year. Montrose, left high
and dry by Charles, was executed by hanging and quartering. Parts of his body were exhibited on buildings around Scotland.

Charles was already showing the perplexing mix of characteristics that would become more apparent in future years. His wish
to further his cause was undermined by his constant desire to retreat into personal pleasure. This flaw was not without its
reasons. He had been forced into a humiliating flight from his country to an uncertain future abroad. As a youth he had suffered
the indignity of having no autonomy at his mother’s cash-strapped court in Paris. Not only did Henrietta need money herself,
she refused to give the prince any allowance of his own, thereby reducing him to the status of a dependant. There was worse:
he began to hear most unflattering things about his father, very much at odds with the image portrayed in the
Eikon
. Charles, he gathered, had through stubbornness and lack of statecraft been the author of his own misfortunes. Whatever else
he did, the prince knew he had to break out and somehow become his own man. In tattered shoes and with no regular income,
it was a tall order.

In England, the constant fear of royalist plots led the Council of State to appoint a head of espionage. Thomas Scot’s job
was to manage the gathering of intelligence both at home and abroad. He took up his post on 1 July. Scot was a stridently
independent
supporter of the Commonwealth and a hater of all things Presbyterian. Not much is known for certain about his early years;
he was said to have been educated at Westminster School and Cambridge, but there is record of neither. He was said to have
practised as an attorney but his name does not appear on the rolls of any of the Inns of Court.
³⁰
With his shadowy past, he was perfect material for a double agent, never mind a spymaster. He set about creating a network
of spies that would come into its own in the 1650s.

On the propaganda front, Parliament was slower to react. By the autumn, it decided that the claims of
Eikon Basilike
should be officially refuted. John Milton was commissioned to write a response. Of course, Milton had already written a response
of his own at the beginning of the year. But now he had a job in the government. In March he had accepted the post of Secretary
for Foreign Tongues, an important diplomatic position that made use of his language skills, for he wrote Latin, French and
Italian.

His new counter-blast was called
Eikonoklastes
(‘The Icon-breaker’). A severe Puritan riposte, stating that Charles and the monarchy were icons that should be broken down
so that the rule of God could prevail, it built on the arguments he had made in
The Tenure of Kings
. Monarchy could lead to tyranny, and Episcopalian religion was similarly tainted. To some extent, the arguments were a rehearsal
for themes that would be explored in his poetic masterpiece,
Paradise Lost
. In the event, his arguments had little effect. In any propaganda battle, the first salvo is usually the most effective.

In January 1650, the Commonwealth made another bizarre foreign appointment. The academic and political theorist Anthony Ascham
was posted as ambassador to Spain. From early in the Civil Wars, Ascham had supported the parliamentary cause. When the royal
princes, Henry, Duke of Gloucester and James, Duke of York (the future James II), were taken into Parliament’s care in 1646,
he was appointed their tutor.

Ascham was the son of a well-to-do alderman from Boston,
Lincolnshire. He was sent by his father to be educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, where he excelled and was appointed
a fellow. Ascham joined in the philosophical and political arguments regarding power and authority that gained currency throughout
the 1640s. He was of the opinion that once power had been wrested away from the king (the historical authority), the population
no longer owed allegiance to the crown but to the body that now wielded de facto power – the army.
³¹
This point of view was looked upon with revulsion by many who considered it likely to lead to anarchy.

Ascham was not supposed to travel alone to Spain. At the time of his posting to Madrid, a preacher named Hugh Peters (or Peter)
was designated consul to Andalucía. It was intended that he and Ascham should travel together as far as Madrid. A Cambridge-educated
radical preacher, Peters was something of a favourite of Cromwell’s. During an interesting career, he had been the minister
to the church in Salem, Massachusetts, and had helped set up the English colony in Connecticut. Cromwell favoured men who
had been to America. He had once considered going there himself. For some reason, Peters’ appointment to Spain was cancelled
and he became chaplain to the Council of State. Perhaps he feared going the same way as Isaac Dorislaus, whose name had been
turned into street slang by the Leveller leader John Lilburne: to fear being murdered was to fear being ‘Dorislaused’.

Ascham’s departure for Spain was delayed by illness. Finally, he was well enough to set off and he sailed in the fleet commanded
by Admiral Robert Blake. Blake and Ascham shared a common cause: to neutralise a royalist fleet commanded by Prince Rupert,
cousin to the Prince of Wales, which was preying on English shipping, capturing merchant ships and taking them into port on
the Tagus in Portugal. Ascham’s mission was to persuade King Philip IV of Spain to help stop his enemies, the Portuguese,
from making their depredations on Commonwealth shipping; Blake’s task was to use force to stop the plunder. As things worked
out, Blake would have a much more successful mission than Ascham.