King Charles II Read Free

Certainly the wavering multitude had many tuneful rumours at their disposal: these included the story that a French (Catholic) army had landed at Portsmouth, inspired by Henrietta Maria, and that an Irish (Catholic) army had been ordered by Strafford to come to the King’s assistance.
    The King hesitated. On 2 May he married off Charles’ nine-year-old sister Mary to the fifteen-year-old Prince of Orange, son of the Stadtholder of the Netherlands. It was hoped that Parliament, like a hungry dog smelling meat, would be appeasedby the somewhat small bone of this Protestant but otherwise unremarkable match. fn2 Parliament was not appeased. By 10 May the King could hesitate no longer. The royal assent to Strafford’s execution was given.
    The next day he decided to send Charles down to the House of Lords with a desperate yet somehow embarrassed message. Could not Strafford ‘fulfil the natural course of his life in a close imprisonment’? If this could be done without ‘the discontentment of my people’ it would be ‘an unspeakable contentment’ to the King. But of course if nothing less than Strafford’s life would satisfy this same people, then the King must say ‘Fiat Justitia’. Even the postscript after the King’s signature had a rather shabby sound to it: ‘and if Strafford must die, it were charity to reprieve him until Saturday’. 4 Armed with this paper, the nine-year-old Prince of Wales did not succeed in convincing Parliament to stay its hand.
    Strafford was executed the next day.
    As Laud (himself imprisoned and subsequently executed) observed, Strafford was dead with ‘more honour than any of them will gain which hunted after his life’. In particular, he was dead with more honour than his royal master was alive. Charles, the witness to all this, including those popular threats of harm to his mother which had probably precipitated his father’s assent, was growing up with a vengeance.
    About the time of Strafford’s execution, Charles’ first governor, Newcastle, resigned his charge. The new incumbent, the Marquess of Hertford, was an odd hangover of royal history. Twenty-five years earlier he had married in secret James I ’s cousin Arbella Stuart. The King was furious when he found out, suspecting Hertford of aiming at the succession. The marriage had been quashed, the couple imprisoned. That period of Hertford’s past was long forgotten, but his very age made him an ineffective governor, compared to Newcastle. At the same time the House of Commons was becoming increasinglyaggressive on the subject of the Prince of Wales: the Puritan element questioned whether Charles should not be surrounded by more suitable attendants than those designated by his father and, above all, by his mother. It was the measure of the importance given to the role that John Hampden himself was said to desire the post of the Prince’s governor, in order to instruct him in ‘principles suitable as to what should be established as laws’. 5 As a counterpoint, the Scots from across the border were vociferous in their claim that the Prince, like his father, should spend more time in Scotland.
    If ten years before it had been thought important that the very rockers of Charles’ cradle should be Protestants, how much more vital was the religion of his tutors! When the King planned a new expedition – of negotiation and discussion – to Scotland in the summer of 1641, certain members of the House of Commons, including Oliver Cromwell, proposed that Hertford alone was inadequate to escort the Prince of Wales. He should be stiffened by two good Puritan lords in the shape of Lords Bedford, and Saye and Sele. Charles did not in fact accompany his father, but the controversy raged on. Two sets of proposals put by Parliament to the King, the Ten Propositions of June 1641 and the Nineteen Propositions a year later, made specific suggestions for the upbringing of Charles and the rest of the young royal family.
    In October 1641