"Indeed, I cannot flatter myself with expectations of good success more than this, to end my days with honour and a good conscience, which obliges me to continue my endeavours, as not despairing that God may in due time avenge His own cause.
"Though I must avow to all my friends—that he who will stay with me at this time must expect and resolve either to die for a good cause or (which is worse) to live as miserable in maintaining it as the violence of insulting rebels can make it."
As for the King's future plans, they were vague, uncertain, and waited on events. Every General in arms for him—Rupert, Goring, Hapton, Montrose—fought on their own, with no other guidance than what their talents and circumstances might give them, and Charles might either join the one of them who was most successful or return to Oxford, which had been for nearly three years his headquarters. He was not without hopes that the energies of the Queen might land another army in England, either Frenchmen supplied by her brother or Dutchmen sent by his son-in-law, the Prince of Orange.
He had some encouragement, too, to believe that the Scots, who disliked Independency almost as much as Prelacy, might yet be detached from their alliance with the Parliament. It was known that they did not love Cromwell nor he them, and the more that he gained in importance the more their ardour for the cause he represented cooled. It was said that they had even viewed the defeat of the malignants at Naseby with a cold and dubious eye, as they considered the discomfiture of the royalists quite balanced by the triumph of the Sectarists, Schismists, and Anabaptists who composed Cromwell's Ironsides.
Charles, therefore, nourished some fantastic hope that by deluding the Scots into thinking he would take the Covenant that was their shibboleth, he might altogether detach them from his enemies. It was a subtle and difficult piece of policy, and could only be accomplished by those intrigues which had so often damaged the King before; but Charles dallied with the idea, while he waited for the news of a victory from Montrose which would put Scotland in a more submissive attitude.
The middle of September came, and there was no message from the Marquess. Charles soothed himself with memories of the Graeme's victories at Aberdeen, Perth, Inverlochy, and Kilsyth, and whiled away the time with reading, meditation, and the elegant companionship of the cultured and poetical Newcastle and the fantastical and brilliant Digby.
These two were with the King in the garden of the house, or castle, where he lodged in the afternoon of one lovely day when the sun sent a bloom of gold over the majestic scenery and glittered in the stately windings of the Trent.
The talk fell on the Marquess of Winchester, who had so long held Basing against the Parliament that the Cavaliers had come to call it Loyalty House and the Puritans to curse it as a cesspool of Satan or outpost of hell.
"I would that my noble lord was here," said Charles, with feeling.
"He doth better service to Your Majesty," returned Lord George Digby, "in defying the rebels from Basing House."