To Catch A King: Charles II's Great Escape. Charles Spencer

a salary of £100 a year, ‘whereby he may subsist while endeavouring to serve the Commonwealth’.2

      The rise of printed domestic news and propaganda was a pronounced feature of the English Civil War. The first such publication, The Heads of Severall Proceedings in this Present Parliament, appeared in November 1641, nine months before hostilities began. There was then an explosion of the printed word, with approximately 300 different partisan newsbooks competing for attention during the 1640s and 1650s. Although many faded away after a few issues, several of them appeared with regularity, the most popular having a run of up to 1,500 copies at a time.3

      Milton and Nedham were both relentless promoters of the kingless state. One of their constant refrains was the merciless mockery of any who proposed that Charles, Prince of Wales – who was sometimes referred to as ‘the Young Pretender’ – should regain his family’s throne. These attacks showed what a terrifying prospect it was for those who had killed the father, should the son return to hold them to account.

      The question for those Royalists who had been so decisively defeated in two civil wars, between the summers of 1642 and 1648, was who would provide the manpower to make it possible to challenge Parliament’s army, now their own forces had been crushed. The answer to this was most vigorously addressed by the widowed queen.

      When Henrietta Maria was informed of her husband’s execution, she stood mute and motionless for an age, seized by a shock that she seems not to have come fully to terms with during the remaining twenty years of her life. In the aftermath of Charles I’s death she retreated briefly to a Carmelite nunnery. On re-emerging she wore mourning clothes, and would do so for the rest of her days.

      Henrietta Maria wrote of her wish to ‘retire with only two maids, my secretary, and confessor, to private life, to finish my days with the least possible disturbance, disentangled from the world’.4 She could not forget, though, the hopes and wishes that her husband had shared with her during the darkest periods of the later years of his rule.

      In July 1646 he had written to her: ‘And though the worst should come, yet I conjure thee to turn thy grief into a just revenge upon my enemies, and the repossessing of Prince Charles into his inheritances.’5 Two months earlier he had sent a letter to his eldest son that had equal clarity: ‘I command you to obey [your mother] in everything, except religion, concerning which I am confident she will not trouble you.’6

      Charles was convinced that his wife could be a great support to their eldest son, for he knew how heavily he himself had leant on her throughout the Civil Wars. When the king’s baggage train was captured at the battle of Naseby in June 1645, the correspondence unearthed there revealed the full extent of Henrietta Maria’s hold over her husband. One letter particularly appalled Parliament. In it, Charles had written: ‘I give thee power to promise in my name, to whom thou thinkest most fit, that I will take away all the penal laws against the Roman Catholics in England, as soon as God shall enable me to do it.’7 One of the main charges levelled against the king by his Puritan and Presbyterian enemies had been that he was secretly sympathetic to Roman Catholicism, thanks to his wife’s corrosive influence. This letter conclusively proved the point.

      Henrietta Maria knew her husband to be weak, and easily swayed by his advisers. She wrote despairingly of how he was apt ‘to take sudden counsels’,8 many of which, she felt, ran contrary to the Crown’s and her family’s interests.

      This situation had become much more difficult for Henrietta Maria to control after she and Charles parted at Abingdon, for what would turn out to be the last time, on 17 April 1644. She had hugged her husband’s knees, begging him to let her stay by his side. But he was adamant that she must go abroad, to secure him aid. Her usefulness in that purpose overrode his thoughts for himself, because, he said, her remaining with him would be his ‘greatest consolation’. ‘And I found myself ten leagues distant from him,’ the queen would recall, ‘before I became conscious that I had left him, so much did grief overcome my natural senses’.9 The great sadness of parting aside, Henrietta Maria was also troubled at leaving her husband far removed from her controlling hand.

      The queen was proud to be a child of one of France’s great kings, Henri IV, who had been stabbed to death by an assassin when she was less than six months old. She hoped that those who governed the land of her birth would respect her position as one of its princesses, and choose to help her family in its quest for restoration to its royal powers. But the French were embroiled in European conflict, principally the Franco–Spanish War, which had started in 1635 and would rumble on till 1659. They also had to contend with the ‘Fronde’, their own civil war, which erupted in 1648, largely brought about by the huge cost of funding France’s wars.

      Meanwhile Henrietta Maria’s brother, Louis XIII, died in 1643. She had hoped he would help her and her husband to overpower the English rebels. Now, she found, France’s leading figures were mostly delighted to stand and watch the spectacle across the Channel as their centuries-old enemy tore itself in two.

      Henrietta Maria had written to her only surviving brother, the Duke of Orléans, at the beginning of 1646: ‘I expect nothing but entire ruin, unless France assists us.’10 But Orléans was unable to help. He was frequently at odds with Anne of Austria, his young nephew Louis XIV’s mother and regent, and with the chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin. Meanwhile Anne and Mazarin’s foreign policy was focused on the fight with Spain, with England’s discord merely a delicious side dish.

      Despite this, Mazarin, the consummate diplomat, seemed to promise much to Henrietta Maria. ‘Had I believed Cardinal Mazarin,’ she wrote, ‘I should have thought he was putting to sea with the most powerful army that had ever left France, for the help of our lost kingdoms.’ After being repeatedly let down by him, she concluded bitterly ‘that all that he said was only a cheat to quiet me’. But she never gave up hope that France could be persuaded to do the right thing for her and for her family.

      When Mazarin funded the Duke of Modena in a failed bid against Spain, Henrietta Maria told him that France’s support for her husband would have cost half as much, and that it would have succeeded. ‘To which,’ she recalled, ‘the cardinal made no reply, but took a hasty leave, showing by his mode of treating me, that he no longer recognized me as a queen, and the daughter of a French monarch.’11

      While Henrietta Maria may have said that she considered herself just ‘a poor and wretched widow, in the flood of her miserable emotions’, she busily explored all avenues for retrieving her husband’s lost crown. These included the possibility of hiring the Duke of Lorraine’s forces, or of trusting in the goodwill of Denmark or Sweden. But in the end for various reasons these came to nothing. Ireland and Scotland were left as the most promising springboards for restoring the Stuart cause. The queen and her intimates looked at the Roman Catholicism of the Irish, and the Presbyterianism of the Scottish, and decided the sacrifice of siding with either was a price worth paying, given the magnitude of their ultimate goal.

      But the past could not be wished away. Charles I’s rule of Scotland had been poorly judged. He had no first-hand experience of Scottish politics, which were enmeshed in the rigidity of the nation’s Church – the ‘Kirk’ – and in the undulating power of the various noble factions. Nor did he appreciate how the physical absence from Scotland of his father (King James returned to his homeland just once during his twenty-two years on the English throne), and then of himself, had left a power vacuum that had, in large part, been filled by the Kirk.

      For its part, the Kirk had supreme confidence in its power, seeing itself as the earthly manager of God’s wishes. It viewed monarchs as royal magistrates, who served a useful purpose but were unworthy of veneration. The Kirk