CHAPTER I.

CHARLES IN HIS CAPTIVITY.

CHARLES himself becomes now the central object. For now, one may say, he was left to think and act wholly for himself, and to work out by his own cogitations and conduct the rest of the long problem between him and his subjects. From this point, therefore, one follows him with a more sympathetic interest than can be accorded to any part of his previous career. When his captivity began (which may be said to have been when the Scots withdrew with him to Newcastle, May 1646) he was forty-five years and six months old. His hair was slightly grizzled; but otherwise he was in the perfect strength and health of a man of spare and middle-sized frame, whose habits had been always careful and temperate.

Henrietta-Maria was nine years younger than her husband. For two years they had not seen each other, her co-operation during that time having been given from her residence at or near Paris. There her effort had been to induce the French Queen Regent and Cardinal Mazarin to interfere actively for Charles, with or without the help of the Pope; and, when she had not succeeded in that, she had contented herself with sending to Charles from time to time her criticisms of his procedure and her notions of the kind of arrangement he ought to try to make with his subjects in the last extremity. The influence she had acquired over him was so great that these missives were perfectly efficient substitutes for her black eyes and French-English tongue when she had been with him. Unfortunately, however, the co-agency with his absent Queen to which he thus felt himself obliged, and to which indeed he had solemnly pledged himself, had become the more perplex

ing because, in the particular of greatest practical moment to both, he and she tended different ways. Of the two main concessions involved in any possible treaty with the Parliament, that of the abandonment of Episcopacy and that of the surrender of the Militia, Charles was most tenaciously predetermined against the first. It was a matter of conscience with him. Next to the death of Strafford, the thing in his past life which caused him the most continued "private remorse was his assent, in Feb. 1641-2, to the Bill excluding Bishops from Parliament: whatever happened, he would sin no more in that direction. He would consent to any restriction of his kingly power in the Militia and other matters, rather than do more in repudiation of Episcopacy. Nay, he had reasoned himself into a belief that the course thus most to his conscience would be also the most expedient. Buoying himself up with a hope that, though Parliament demanded both concessions, they might let him off with one, he was of opinion that kingly power in the Militia and other matters might be more easily fetched back by a retained Episcopacy than a lost Episcopacy could be restored by any remnant of his power in the Militia. With Queen Henrietta-Maria the reasoning was different. To her, a Roman Catholic, back now among her co-religionists, what were all the disputes of British Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Independents, but battles of kites and crows? If her husband's kind of Protestant Church could have been retained, that of course would have been well; but, as things were, she had no patience with those scruples of conscience for which he would sacrifice the most substantial interests of himself and his family. His main object ought to be to retain as much of real kingly power as possible, to be enjoyed by himself and her, and transmitted to their descendants; and might not this be attained by a frank concession to the English of the Presbyterian settlement, only with a personal dispensation to the King if he desired it very much, a reservation of liberty for the Roman Catholics of Ireland and England, and, of course, a toleration for the Queen herself in her private Roman Catholic worship?

Actually, with all the King's firmness within himself on the Episcopacy question, the Queen's influence had so far prevailed as to bring him into a position where her views rather than his had chances in their favour. That he was now a captive at all, that he was still in Great Britain to maintain passively the struggle in which he had failed actively, was very much the Queen's doing. Again and again since the blow of Naseby, or at least since Montrose's ruin at Philiphaugh, it had been in the King's mind to abandon the struggle for the time, and withdraw to Holland, Denmark, or some other part of the Continent. That he had not, while the sea was open to him, adopted this course, was owing in part to his own irresolution, but very considerably to his dread of the Queen's displeasure. She did not want him to be on the Continent with her, a dependent on her relatives of the French Court or on the Dutch Stadtholder; she wanted him to remain in Britain and struggle on, somehow, anyhow. Nay, she had devised a particular way for him, and almost compelled him to it. A flight to the Scots and a pact with them on the basis of some acceptance of their Presbyterianism even for England: this was the course which she had urged on him ever since his defeat by Parliament had become certain; this was the course she had arranged for him by causing the French Court to send over Montreuil to negotiate for his reception among the Scots; and, though things had not turned out quite as she expected, and the Scots had shown no disposition to save Charles from the tremendous Nineteen Propositions of the English Parliament, still she did not regret that the course had been taken. It was for the King now to extricate himself from the Nineteen Propositions by his utmost ingenuity, and she did not doubt that this would be most easily done by adhering to the Scots, humouring them in all those parts of the Propositions that related to Presbytery, and evading or refusing the rest.1

Irritating as the Queen's conduct in the main had been to Hyde, Hopton, and others of the Royalist exiles, there were

1 For this and last paragraph see Charles I. in 1646, Introduction by Mr. Bruce, and the King's own Letters

passim; Clar. 591-600 (Hist.) and 961 (Life); Hallam's Const. Hist. (10th ed.), II. 182-188, with notes.

particulars of selfishness in it which positively disgusted them. Having persisted in her determination that the Prince of Wales should reside with herself, and nowhere else, she had carried that point, as she did every other, with Charles; and since July the Prince, as well as his infant sister, the Princess Henrietta-Maria, had been under her charge. Rather than accompany the Prince to Paris, and undertake the responsibility of advising him in matters in which it would be necessary to detach him from his mother, Hyde, Hopton, and Lord Capel had remained in Jersey, happy for a time in their mutual society, and Hyde, as he tells us, passing the pleasantest hours of his life in the composition of parts of his History. Others of the King's late counsellors, such as Cottington, the Earl of Bristol, and Secretary Nicholas, had domiciled themselves in Rouen, Caen, or elsewhere in France, away from Paris. But round the Queen, in Paris or at St. Germains, there had gathered not a few of the exiles, gratifying the King more, as it proved, by this compliance than the others did by their prudery. Among these were Lord Jermyn, Lord Digby, Lord Percy, Lord Wilmot, and even Lord Colepepper, though he had at first agreed with Hyde in opposing the removal of the Prince from Jersey. Conspicuous in the same group of refugees was the veteran Thomas Hobbes. Not that he had gone to Paris at that time, as the others had done, in the mere course of Royalist duty. He had been there for several years on his own account, that he might be out of the turmoil of affairs at home, and free to pursue his speculations in quiet, with the relaxation of walks about Notre Dame and the Sorbonne, and much of the agreeable company of M. Gassendi. But the Prince could not be without a tutor, and Hobbes was chosen to instruct him in mathematics and whatever could be brought under that head. If what Clarendon says is true, the philosopher must have had curious remarks to make on the relations between his royal pupil and his mother, and on that lady's own behaviour. Though the Prince was sixteen years of age, she governed him with a high hand. "He never put his hat on before the Queen," says Clarendon;