King Charles II Read Free Page A

there were squabbles with the Commons about Charles’ education: one faction demanded that only ‘safe’ people (religiously safe, not Popish) should be allowed near him. The arguments were still going on in January 1642. That was the month in which the King, failing in his attempt to arrest five Members of the Commons, was humiliatingly rebuffed by the Speaker of the House himself. So finally he left the capital.
    The following six months of the year were spent by both sides, King and Parliament, in preparations for a war which no-one thought particularly desirable, but almost everyone now thought was inevitable. The King reacted to the Commons’ threats concerning his son by keeping Charles more closely with him, rather than less. In any case, the role of the father was made heavier by the fact that Henrietta Maria left for theContinent in February to try and raise money for arms by selling her jewels. There were happy periods of respite: another jaunt to Cambridge and a visit to the Ferrars family at nearby Little Gidding, where Charles ate apple pie and cheese in the pantry and they all played cards. But in general life was more serious, as the King prepared earnestly if sadly for the coming contest. A letter from Charles to his sister Mary in Holland, written in March from Royston, refers to the King as ‘very much disconsolate and troubled, partly for my royal mother’s and your absence, and partly for the disturbances of the kingdom’. (Mary had not travelled abroad at the time of her marriage, but did so a year later with Henrietta Maria.) It is a laborious composition, no doubt written under duress – what eleven-year-old boy ever wrote voluntarily to his younger sister? Only in the latter half does a hint of Charles’ own cheerful temperament creep in: ‘Dear sister, we are as much as we may merry, and more than we would sad, in respect we cannot alter the present distempers of these troublesome times.’ 6
    Charles remained at his father’s side for the next three years.
    Thus the origins of the intense love which the son felt for the father, the reverence which Charles II would feel for the memory of Charles I , were to be found in this period of the King’s greatest tribulation. The young Charles, in common with the rest of the Royalists, cannot have failed to admire his father for his dignity, the admirable spiritual quality which enabled the King to accept alterations in his personal circumstances with equanimity. At the same time Charles, like any other son, also had an opportunity to judge his father more harshly concerning his purely tactical behaviour. The fatal mixture of weakness and strength, in exactly the wrong proportions, was also observed first hand by Charles. So too was the use of deceit, justified by the need to preserve his royal rights.
    Charles and his brother James were both at their father’s side on that ominous day, 22 August 1642, when he raised the standard of war at Nottingham Castle. The vast royal banner loomed above their heads, so heavy that it needed twenty men to grapple with it – and incidentally so unstable that it hadblown down that evening. The King’s entourage included their Palatine cousin, the twenty-two-year-old Prince Rupert, a spirited young fellow with theories about warfare which would shortly be tested. The herald had difficulty in making out the exact text of the declaration of war, because the King had altered it by hand at the last moment; his speech was hard to follow. The confusion which ensued was matched by the uncertainty which many in England, Scotland and Ireland felt about the precise issues involved. Nevertheless, to the young Princes at least the issues probably seemed as simple as Clarendon would later describe them: ‘The whole business of the matter was whether the King was above Parliament, or Parliament in ruling, above the King.’
    Already Charles was enjoying the privileges ensured to him by his ancient chivalric title of Prince