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

in the government of England until that plan reached fruition. In return, Charles I was to be rescued from his island imprisonment and taken to London, where a settlement would be forced out of his enemies in Parliament. The main Scottish army would stand poised to invade if the king’s and the Engagers’ demands were rejected.

      Argyll, Wariston and the other hardline Covenanters were against any such alliance, because it would compromise their rigid religious beliefs. They felt vindicated when the Engagers’ army was destroyed at the battle of Preston, in August 1648. The Kirk party was now left in control in Scotland. In January 1649 it decreed that any who had agreed to the Engagement must be barred from public office.

      The news of the execution of the king at the end of that same month changed everything. It provoked horror throughout Scotland. The Kirk already felt that Parliament had failed to honour its commitment to settle Presbyterianism on England. Now it had also, contrary to its promise, beheaded the Scots’ king.

      In Edinburgh on 5 February 1649, six days after Charles I’s execution, Prince Charles was proclaimed king of Scotland, England and Ireland. War with England was from that point inevitable.

      While the Covenanters were quick to proclaim the exiled prince ‘King Charles II’, they made it clear that he could not actually rule until he had signed the National Covenant, with its guarantees of religious and political union. The following month a delegation of Covenanters travelled to see Charles in the Netherlands, and presented him with a bundle, carefully bound in one form, containing their demands and creeds, with the Covenant at its core.

      Charles was startled by the terms offered. ‘They presented to him three propositions, demanding that he should banish Montrose & all other malignants and evil counselors from his court; that he should take the Covenant himself & establish it through all his dominions; & that he should bring but an hundred persons with him into Scotland, among which there should be none that had bore arms for his late Majesty.’17

      Charles’s disappointment at the proposals was aggravated by the attitude of his hosts, the deputies of the various Dutch States, who encouraged him to agree to any terms put forward by the Scots. They knew he had nowhere else to turn, other than to Ireland, and that would involve what was, to them, a deeply troubling alliance with Roman Catholics.

      But Charles still had hopes that Ireland could prove to be his saviour, because the Royalists there had allied with a Catholic confederacy to form a significant force. The resulting army, commanded by the Marquess of Ormonde, was busying itself in anticipation of an invasion by England’s New Model Army. After visiting his mother at St-Germain, Charles returned to Jersey in September 1649, ready to cross to Ireland. But by the time he landed on the island, things had changed very much for the worse. For in mid-August Cromwell had landed near Dublin.

      Cromwell soon eliminated Ireland as a possible springboard for the Royalists, tearing through inadequate defences and inferior troops, leaving still unforgotten and unforgiven carnage in his wake. By early 1650, Scotland was the only possible source of military help available to Charles. In February he returned from Jersey to the Continent knowing he had a choice: either side with the Scots, or continue in impotent exile.

      It was a question of what compromise he could now accept to win over the deeply distrustful Covenanters. For their part, they already knew quite a lot about him. He seemed to be very far removed from the epitome of humility and religious devotion that they might have hoped for.

* Argyll swore by a Latin saying that translated as ‘Dead men don’t bite.’

      4

       The Crown, Without Glory

      He that sits on a dunghill today, may tomorrow sit on a throne.

      The Man in the Moon, April 1650

      The Marquess of Montrose, the leading Scottish Royalist, was still in exile when the news of Charles I’s beheading reached him. He, like the queen, was dumbstruck with bewilderment. When he could at last bring himself to speak, it was to swear an oath of vengeance. He vowed to see that the king’s heir was placed on his rightful throne, or to perish in the attempt: ‘As I never had passion upon Earth so strong as that to do your King father service, so it shall be my study,’ he promised the newly declared king of Scotland, ‘to show it redoubled for the recovery of you.’1 Montrose’s unquestioning loyalty would not be reciprocated by his new master.

      Charles agreed to look again at the Scottish offering rejected in the Netherlands the previous year. Those speaking for the king justified an agreement with the Scots as ‘an effectual means to save Ireland, recover the King’s Right in England, and to bring the Murderers of His Majesty’s Father to condign punishment’.2

      Charles encouraged Montrose to return to fight for him in the Highlands. This was in order to put pressure on the Scottish Covenanters there, while Charles negotiated with their representatives in the Netherlands, but Montrose took the royal instruction at face value. He arrived in the northern tip of Scotland with 500 German, Danish and Dutch mercenaries, and some hardy but untrained men from the Orkneys. But the clans failed to rise in his support, fearing the strength of the Covenanters while sensing the weakness of the Crown.

      Before he set off for the Netherlands, Charles went to see his mother in a bid to smooth over the differences in the Royalist camp. Lord Byron, one of Charles I’s close supporters, wrote to the Marquess of Ormonde on 11 March 1650 that Henrietta Maria and Charles had just spent ten days together in Beauvais. The king was now heading for Breda, while his mother headed for Paris. ‘They met with great kindness on both sides and I hope will part so,’ wrote Byron, ‘and with a full reconcilement of those differences that formerly were betwixt them.’ Byron pointed to various figures in Charles’s court, including Sir Edward Hyde, who remained set against the treaty with the Scots: ‘[They] have by all possible means endeavoured to render the treaty we hope for, altogether fruitless to the king.’3

      A few days later another Royalist in exile, Henry Seymour, reported to Ormonde that Charles was determined on action, even if the Scots proved impossible to negotiate with: ‘If the treaty [with the Scots] succeed not his Majesty is resolved to lose no more time in idleness, and therefore must either go to you, or to my lord Montrose into Scotland. His own inclinations lean to the first. But a powerful interest [Henrietta Maria] … prefers the other, whose game lies another way.’4

      The negotiations with the Scots lasted from 26 March till the end of April 1650. Charles then capitulated to all demands relating directly to Scotland, but not those that the Scots had pushed for which were connected to England or Ireland. As king of Scotland, he agreed to swear the Oath of the Covenant, and said he would commit to the supreme rule of the Presbyterian Kirk in Scotland.

      One of the Scottish delegation, Alexander Jaffray, recorded in his diary the joylessness of the resulting union: ‘Being sent there by the [Scottish] Parliament, in the year 1650, for that same business, we did sinfully both entangle and engage the nation and our selves, and that poor young prince to whom we were sent; making him sign and swear a covenant, which we knew, from clear and demonstrable reasons, that he hated in his heart. Yet, finding that upon these terms only, he could be admitted to rule over us (all other means having failed him), he sinfully complied with what we most sinfully pressed upon him – where, I must confess, to my apprehension, our sin was more than his.’5

      At the same time, news of the alliance gave some English Royalists hope, John Crouch printing in the periodical The Man in the Moon:

      Then cheer up Cavaliers; I hear

      The