SECOND STAGE OF THE CAPTIVITY: AT HOLMBY HOUSE: FEB. 1646-7—JUNE 1647.
The King's Manner of Life at Holmby—New Omens in his favour from the
Relations of Parliament to its own Army—Proposals to disband the Army
and reconstruct part of it for service in Ireland—Summary of Irish
Affairs since 1641—Army's Anger at the proposal to disband it—View of
the State of the Army: Medley of Religious Opinions in it: Passion for
Toleration: Prevalence of Democratic Tendencies: The Levellers—
Determination of the Presbyterians for the Policy of Disbandment, and
Votes in Parliament to that effect—Resistance of the Army: Petitions and
Remonstrances from the Officers and Men: Regimental Agitators—Cromwell's
Efforts at Accommodation: Fairfax's Order for a General Rendezvous—
Cromwell's Adhesion to the Army—The Rendezvous at Newmarket, and Joyce's
Abduction of the King from Holmby—Westminster Assembly Business: First
Provincial Synod of London: Proceedings for the Purgation of Oxford
University.
Holmby or Holdenby House in Northamptonshire had been built by Lord Chancellor Hatton in Elizabeth's time, but afterwards purchased by Queen Anne for her son Charles while he was but Duke of York. It was a stately mansion, with gardens, very much to the King's taste. It was not till the 16th of February that he arrived there, the journey from Newcastle having been broken by halts at various places, at each of which crowds had gathered respectfully to see him, and poor people had begged for his royal touch to cure them of the king's evil. Near Nottingham he had been met by General Fairfax, who had dismounted, kissed his hand, and then turned back, conveying him through that town, and conversing with him. [Footnote: Rushworth, VI. 398; Whitlocke (ed. 1853), II. 115; Sir Thomas Herbert's Memoirs of the last Two Years of the Reign of King Charles I..(1813), 13-15. Herbert was a kinsman and protégé of the Pembroke family, who had travelled much in the East, published an account of his travels, and had acquired quiet and æsthetic tastes. He had been in various posts of Parliamentary employment, procured for him by Philip, Earl of Pembroke; but, having accompanied that Earl when he went to Newcastle as one of the Commissioners to take charge of the King, he had attracted the King's regard, so that, on the dismissal of some of the King's attendants at Holmby, he was selected to be one of the grooms of the bedchamber. He remained faithfully with the King to his death, cherished his memory afterwards, was made a baronet by Charles II. after the Restoration, and died in 1681. Two or three years before his death he wrote, at a friend's request, the above-mentioned Memoirs, containing interesting reminiscences and anecdotes of Charles in his captivity. They were reprinted in 1702 and again in 1813 (see a memoir of Herbert in Wood's Ath. IV. 15-42).]
During the four months of the King's stay at Holmby his mode of life was very regular and pleasant. The house and its appurtenances, being large, easily accommodated not only the King and all his permitted servants, but also the Parliamentary Commissioners and their retinue, besides Messrs. Marshall and Caryl, Colonel Graves as military commandant, and the under- officers and soldiers of the guard. The allowance of Parliament for the King's own expenses was 50_l._ a day, so that "all the tables were as well furnished as they used to be when his Majesty was in a peaceful and flourishing state." At meal-times the Commissioners always waited upon his Majesty, and the two chaplains were generally also present. It was almost his only complaint that Parliament persisted in keeping these two reverend gentlemen about him, and would not let him have chaplains of his own persuasion. But, though he declined the religious services of Messrs. Marshall and Caryl, and said grace at table himself rather than ask them to do so, he was civil to them personally, and allowed such of his servants as chose to attend their sermons. On Sundays Charles kept himself quite retired to his private devotions and meditations, and on other days two or three hours were always spent in reading and study. Among his favourite English books were Bishop Andrewes's Sermons, Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, Herbert's Poems, Fairfax's Tasso, Harrington's Ariosto, Spenser's Faery Queene, and, above all, Shakespeare's Plays, his copy of the Second Folio Edition of which is still in extant, with the words "Dum spiro spero: C. R." written on it by his own hand. But he read also in Greek and Latin, and fluently in French, Italian, and Spanish. At dinner and supper he ate of but a few dishes, and drank sparingly of beer, or wine and water mixed by himself. He disliked tobacco extremely, and was offended by any whiff of it near his presence. His chief relaxations were playing at chess after meals, and walking much in the garden; but, not unfrequently, as he was fond of bowls and there was no good bowling-green at Holmby, he would ride to Lord Spencer's house at Althorp, about three miles off, or even to Lord Vaux's at Harrowden, nine miles off, at both of which places there were excellent bowling-greens and beautiful grounds. In these rides, of course, he was well attended and watched, but still not so strictly but that a packet could sometimes be conveyed to him by a seeming country- bumpkin on a bridge, or a letter in cipher entrusted to a sure hand. Always through the night at Holmby a light was kept burning in the King's chamber, in the form of a wax-cake and wick inside a large silver basin on a low table by the bed, on which also were placed the King's two watches and the silver bell with which he called his grooms. This custom had begun at Oxford and had become invariable. [Footnote: Rushworth, VI. 452-4; Parl. Hist. III. 551 and 557-9; Clar. 608; but chiefly Herbert's Memoirs, 15-25, 61-65, 124-126, and 131. It is remarkable that Herbert, who mentions the other favourite English books of Charles named in the text, does not mention Shakespeare; for Charles's copy of the Second Folio, now in the Royal Library at Windsor, was given to Herbert himself by Charles before his death, and bears, in addition to the inscription in Charles's hand, this in Herbert's, "Ex dono Serenissimi Regis Car. servo suo humiliss. T. Herbert" (Lowndes by Bohn, 2,257). Herbert mentions that Dum spiro spero was a favourite motto with Charles, inscribed by him on many books. But that Shakespeare was a prime favourite of Charles we have Milton's authority in the well-known phrase in the [Greek: Gakonoklastæs]—"one whom we well know was the closet companion of these his solitudes, William Shakespeare.">[
Of course there were continued negotiations between Charles and the Parliament. Anything done in this way, however, during the four months of the stay at Holmby, hardly deserves notice. For at that time there was a huge new clouding of the air in England, pregnant with no one knew what changes, and making the postponement of conclusions between the King and the Parliament quite natural on both sides. All the world has heard of the extraordinary quarrel between the Long Parliament and its own victorious Army.
The war being over, and the troublesome Scots out of England at last, what remained but to disband the Parliamentarian Army, and enter on a period of peace, retrenched expense, and renewed industry? This was what all the orthodox politicians, and especially all the Presbyterians, were saying. In the very act of saying it, however, they faltered and explained. By disbanding they did not mean complete disbanding; some force must still be kept up in England for garrison duty, as a police against fresh Royalist attempts; they meant the disbanding of all beyond the moderate force needed for such use; nay, they did not even then mean actual disbanding of all the surplus; they contemplated the immediate re- enlistment and re-organization of a goodly portion of the surplus for service in another employment. What that was, who needed to be told? Did there not remain for England a tremendous and long-postponed duty beyond her own bounds? Now at length, now at length, was there not leisure to attend to the case of unhappy Ireland?
Unhappy Ireland! Her history at any time is hard to write; but no human intellect could make a clear story of those five particular years of triple distractedness which intervene between the murderous Insurrection of 1641-2 (Vol. II. pp. 308-314) and the beginning of 1647. One can but note a few points.
Through the first year or more of the Insurrection there seemed to be but two parties in Ireland. There was the vast party of the Insurgents, or Confederates, including the whole Roman Catholic population of the island, both the old Irish natives, who had mainly begun the Rebellion, and the Catholics of English descent who had joined in it. Gradually the mere spasmodic atrocity of the first Rebels had been changed into something like an organized warfare, commanded in chief by Generals Preston and Owen Roe O'Neile, while the political conduct of the Rebellion and the government of Confederate Ireland had been provided for by the assembling at Kilkenny of a Parliament of Roman Catholic lords, prelates, and deputies from towns and counties, and by the appointment by that body of county-councils, provincial councils, and a supreme executive council. The other party in Ireland was the small Protestant party, consisting of the mixed English and Scottish population of certain districts of the east and north coasts, with the surviving Protestants from other parts amongst them, and with Dublin and other strongholds still in their possession. At their head ought to have been the Earl of Leicester, Stafford's successor in the Irish Lord-Lieutenancy. But, as Leicester had been detained in England by the King, the management had devolved on the Lords Justices and Councillors resident in Dublin, and on their military assessor, James Butler, 12th Earl of Ormond, who had been Lieutenant-General of the Irish forces under Strafford. In fact it was this able Ormond that had to fight the Rebellion. Though supplies and forces, with some good officers, were sent over from England, and a special army of Scots under General Monro had been lent to the English Parliament for service in Ulster, it was still Ormond that had to direct in chief. His success had been very considerable.
In the course of 1643, however, after the Civil War had begun in England, Ireland and the Rebellion there had become related in a strangely complex manner to the struggle between the King and the Parliament. Whatever share the King may have had, through the Queen, in first exciting the Roman Catholics, he had come to regard the Irish distraction as a magazine of chances in his favour. If he could get into his own hands the command of the Protestant forces employed in putting down the Rebellion, he would have an army in Ireland ready for his service generally, and the policy would then be to come to an arrangement with the Roman Catholic Insurgents, so as to free that army, and perhaps the Insurgents too, for his service in England. Now, though the Lords Justices and most of the Councillors in Dublin were Parliamentarian in their sympathies, Ormond was a Royalist, of a family old in Ireland, far from fanatical in his own Protestantism, and with many relatives and friends among the Roman Catholics. Willing enough, therefore, to fight on against the Confederates, he was yet as willing, on instructions from Oxford, to make an arrangement with them in the King's interests. Actually, on the 15th of September, 1643, he did make a year's truce with the Rebels, which permitted the despatch of some portions of his own force, mixed with Irish Roman Catholics, to the King's assistance in England. Vehement had been the outcry of the English Parliamentarians over this breach of the King's compact with them to leave the conduct of the Irish war wholly to the Parliament; and from that moment there were two Protestant powers or trusteeships for the management of the Irish Rebellion. Ormond, made a Marquis, and raised to the Lord-Lieutenancy in Leicester's place (Jan. 1643-4), was trustee for the King, and continued to rule in Dublin, bound by his truce. In other parts of Ireland, however, the war was maintained in the interests of Parliament and by instructions from London—in Munster by Lord Inchiquin; in Connaught by Sir Charles Coote; and in Ulster by Monro and his Scots, in conjunction with English officers and advisers. So the imbroglio had gone on, a mere chaos of mutual sieges and skirmishes in bogs, and Ireland in fact, through the stress of the Civil War at home, all but abandoned to herself in the meantime. The Confederates were stronger after the end of Ormond's year of truce than they had been before; and in 1645 they were up again against Ormond, as well as against Inchiquin, Coote, and Monro. They had already received help from France and Spain, and in Oct. 1645 there arrived among them no less than a Papal nuncio, Archbishop Rinuccini, with a retinue of other Italians, to take possession of the tumult in the name of his Holiness, and regulate it sacerdotally. In this complexity Ormond had still kept his footing. He had kept it even in the midst of a sudden shock given to his Vice-royalty by Charles himself.
Without Ormond's knowledge, Charles had been trafficking for months with the Confederate Irish Catholics through another plenipotentiary. In Jan. 1645-6 it came out, by accident, that the Roman Catholic Earl of Glamorgan, to whose presence in Ireland for some months no particular significance had been attached, had been treating, in Charles's name, for a Peace with the Confederates on the basis not merely of a repeal of all penal laws against their Religion, but even of its establishment in Ireland. All Britain and Ireland were aghast at the discovery, and even Ormond reeled. Recovering himself, however, he did what he could to save Charles from the results of his own double-dealing. Glamorgan was imprisoned for a time, with tremendous threats; all publicity was given to Charles's letters authorizing proceedings against him as "one who either out of falseness, presumption, or folly, hath so hazarded the blemishing of his Majesty's reputation with his good subjects, and so impertinently framed these Articles out of his own head;" and meanwhile Charles's letters of consolation to Glamorgan, with his thanks, and promises of "revenge and reparation," remained private.