Prince Rupert

William Crowne, a member of the Earl of Arundel’s 1636 embassy to the Emperor, wrote in his diary:

On this same day, seven rebels, the leaders of an armed insurrection of 400 ignorant peasants against the Emperor, were beheaded. The ringleader of the revolt, a fellow who had persuaded himself that no bullet had power to harm him, was led to the scaffold with his face covered and with two men holding him firmly against the block. Here the executioners seized him firmly by the chest with a massive pair of red-hot pincers and, nailing his right hand to the block, chopped it off. Then, quickly drawing the sword he wore at his side, he cut off the wretched fellow’s head which an assistant raised, shouting into the ears of the dead man: ‘Jesus! Jesus!’ At this juncture, the Jesuit, who had accompanied the criminal and had been admonishing him for his sins, asked those present to join in prayer for the soul of the dead man. Following this came the man’s accomplices, including a young boy, all of whom bore crucifixes in their hands and made their individual confessions at the foot of the scaffold to priests, kissing their hands and feet at the end of every prayer. [fn2]

Their penitence was in vain: they were all beheaded and quartered.

Rupert was encouraged by his mother to take part in this war: ‘He cannot too soon be a soldier’, Elizabeth declared, ‘in these active times.’[fn3] She knew it was Rupert’s best hope of making his way in life, and of helping his family to win back its lost lands. In 1632, aged 12, Rupert was sent to Rheinberg to serve under his great-uncle Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange. Soldiery was in his blood and he took to his new profession well — a little too well, for his mother’s liking. She heard tales of camp life — of drinking, swearing, gambling, and womanising — and feared for Rupert’s morals. Elizabeth had been prepared to risk her son’s life, but not his soul, and ordered his recall.

The Prince busied himself honing his fighting skills. Over Christmas, 1633, the Prince of Orange arranged a Passage of Arms, a celebration of military skill that harked back to the age of medieval chivalry. Rupert had just turned 14, but he was tall and powerfully built for his age. A contemporary recorded him ‘carrying away the palm; with such a graceful air accompanying all his actions as drew the hearts and eyes of all the spectators towards him’.[fn4]

Rupert was, from the onset of puberty, viewed as highly eligible. His father had died a failure, in exile. However, the family’s restoration to the Palatinate, if not Bohemia, remained feasible, and Rupert was still the nephew of the King of England. He was also charming and good-looking. Plans were first made for Rupert to be married in his early teens. He was not involved in the search for a bride: his mother and uncle masterminded the operation, looking for a girl who combined high birth with great wealth. The other prime consideration was religion — only a devout Protestant would be acceptable.

The favoured candidate was Marguerite de Rohan, daughter of a prominent French Huguenot duke. The union was first attempted in 1632 and Rupert’s family anticipated a speedy conclusion. ‘Concerning my brother Rupert’, his brother Charles Louis wrote to their mother, ‘M. de Soubise hath made overture that, with your Majesty and your brother’s consent, he thinks M. de Rohan would not be unwilling to match him with his daughter. The King seemeth to like it, but he would have your advice and consent in it. I think it is no absurd proposition, for she is great both in means and birth, and of the Religion.’[fn5]

The negotiations foundered, largely because the Duc de Rohan, who supported the match, died before it could be completed. However, in Charles I’s eyes, Marguerite remained the ideal wife for his nephew. Six years later the king was still pushing for the marriage, telling his ambassador in Paris to contact Cardinal Richelieu, to see if he could persuade Louis XIII to approve the union. ‘This is a business of great weight,’ he reminded the Earl of Leicester, ‘and you know how much we take to heart any thing that concerns the good of our dearest sister, and her children, especially in so high a degree as this; which, if it speed, is to bring so fair an estate to the Prince our nephew.’[fn6]

Even in 1643, when immersed in Civil War, the king still hoped for Rupert and Marguerite’s marriage. He wrote in his own hand to Prince Maurice, Rupert’s younger brother and greatest confidant: ‘Though Mars be now most in vogue, yet Hymen may be sometimes remembered. The matter is this, your mother and I have been somewhat engaged concerning a marriage between your brother Rupert and Mlle de Rohan, and now her friends press your brother to a positive answer, which I find him resolved to give negatively; therefore, I have thought fit to let you know if you will not by your engagement take your brother handsomely off. I have not time to argue this matter, but to show my judgement, I assure you that if my son James were of a fit age, I would want of my will but he should have her.’[fn7] However, Rupert resisted his uncle’s advice — perhaps (as we shall see) because he was by then in love with another woman, the wife of a close friend.

*

In 1635, Rupert returned to the front line, serving as a lifeguard to Frederick Henry of Orange. The campaign against Spain, in the southern Netherlands, was bloody and tough. The Dutch, supported by the French, captured and pillaged Tirlemont, before approaching Louvain. The garrison there proved much more resilient, spurred on by their colleagues’ fate. While the French returned home, the Dutch continued fighting. Rupert, despite his youth, repeatedly attracted praise for his fearlessness under fire. It was also noted that he never used his princely rank to shirk the most menial of military duties. He was determined to learn his chosen profession through a full and rigorous apprenticeship.

The following year, Rupert joined Charles Louis in England, as a guest of Charles I. Elizabeth of Bohemia wrote to Sir Henry Vane, a loyal admirer at court, urging: ‘Give your good counsel to Rupert, for he is still a little giddy, though not as much as he has been. I pray tell him when he does ill, for he is good natured enough’, she said, in a tone lacking maternal warmth, ‘but does not always think of what he should do.’[fn8] To the king, however, his nephews’ arrival added youthful vigour to his stately court. Sir Thomas Roe, who had served Elizabeth I and James I, was a trusted confidant of Elizabeth of Bohemia: she called him ‘Honest Tom’. Roe had visited her in the Netherlands a decade earlier, and in 1630 had engineered the truce between Sweden and Poland that released Gustavus Adolphus to fight in Germany. Roe was now Elizabeth’s eyes and ears in England, writing of Rupert: ‘I have observed him of a rare condition, full of spirit and action, full of observation and judgement. Certainly he will reussir un grand homme [succeed in becoming a great man], for whatever he wills he wills vehemently: so that to what he bends he will be in it excellent.’ Roe noticed Charles’s appreciation of his nephew: ‘His Majesty takes great pleasure in his unrestfulness, for he is never idle, and in his sports serious, in his conversation retired, but sharp and witty when occasion provokes him.’[fn9]

The brothers arrived to find their uncle’s kingdom a haven of peace. While much of Europe was absorbed in the physical and financial drain of the Thirty Years’ War, England stood aloof and prosperous. The courtier-poet Thomas Carew celebrated the nation’s blessings:

Tourneys, masques, theatres better become

Our halcyon days; what though the German drum

Bellow for freedom and revenge, the noise

Concerns not us, nor should divert our joys;

Nor ought the thunder of their cabins

Drown the sweet airs of our tun’d violins.[fn10]

‘Let us be thankful for these times’, wrote the balladeer Martin Parker in 1632, ‘Of plenty, truth and peace.’[fn11] A reign that has, ever since, been synonymous with strife, started off so promisingly that the Earl of Clarendon later judged that England in the 1630s ‘enjoyed the greatest calm, and the fullest measure of felicity, that any people in any age, for so long together, have been blessed with; to the wonder and envy of all other parts of Christendom’.[fn12] When, in 1637, Charles announced to his Palatine nephews that he counted himself the happiest king in Europe, he was not exaggerating.

This was a time of artistic excellence and royal acquisition, when a sensitive and knowledgeable king commissioned the portraiture of Rubens and Van Dyck, while buying the Vatican cartoons of Raphael and the canvases of Rembrandt. It was also an era in which medicine and science were valued and encouraged: William Harvey, who was to prove that blood circulated inside the body, and Sir Theodore de Mayerne, a brilliant clinician who saved Henrietta Maria’s life during her first, complicated childbirth, were among the men of learning who enjoyed Charles’s patronage.

There were cracks, but they were barely visible. Ironically, this was a period when popular support for the Palatine family was being used as a stick to beat the Crown. When, in 1636, the new Prayer Book appeared, shorn of its customary prayer for Elizabeth and her children, there was outrage among the more extreme Protestants. William Prynne, a Lincoln’s Inn barrister, attacked the omission in News from Ipswich, claiming the omission proved that the king’s advisers were Catholic sympathisers; charges that resulted in Prynne’s prosecution. For this, and for further trouble three years earlier, Prynne and two other ‘scandalous, seditious and infamous persons’ were punished with the cropping of their ears. The trial of this agitator blew up into a wider protest against Charles I’s rule without Parliament.

Rupert’s first visit to England also coincided with the blossoming of resistance to Ship Money. In his determination to avoid parliamentary financial control, the king had taken this tax — designed to be paid by port towns for the wartime upkeep of the navy — and levied it in peacetime, across the country. Elizabeth I had done the same, in the 1590s, and had provoked uproar. Charles used most of the tax for its true purpose, strengthening the navy, but his opponents managed to present him as a gross abuser of royal power. The issue came to court in 1637, when John Hampden tried to have Ship Money declared illegal. He failed, but the controversy rumbled on, unresolved in the minds of the court’s critics. People would only later realise that the seeds of civil conflict had taken root at this point.

Charles Louis and Rupert, meanwhile, were treated with all the solemnity accorded to the British royal family. They accompanied their aunt and uncle on a spectacular summer visit to Oxford University, whose chancellor was the controversial Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. Laud was a rigidly doctrinaire Arminian, who had overseen the punishment of dissenters (including William Prynne), in his drive to extinguish Calvinism from the Church of England.

The archbishop was a lonely bachelor, who enjoyed providing extravagant hospitality for his monarch and his family. Laud received the royal party at his college, St John’s, and showed off the newly built library quadrangle, which was adorned with his coat of arms and mitre, and sculptures of angels. Statues of the king and queen dominated the space, while busts representing Grammar and Rhetoric assumed lesser positions.

As the royal party toured the magnificent buildings, Laud’s choristers filled the air with anthems. The music had been calculated to perfection, every piece lasting as long as it took the group to mount each flight of steps. It was High Church theatre: the sort of practice that alienated Puritan England from the archbishop and fuelled the accusations that he was a Catholic stooge. Laud was unapologetic in his indulgence. ‘I do not doubt but you have heard of the great entertainment my lord Archbishop of Canterbury gave the King and Queen at Oxford,’ Charles Louis wrote to his mother in the Netherlands, ‘and the honour he did me, at my request, to make a great number of Doctors, Bachelors, and Masters of Arts.’[fn13] Rupert was among those awarded an honorary Master of Arts’ degree on 30 August 1636. Laud insisted that Charles Louis and Rupert’s names be entered in St John’s books, ‘to do that house honour’.[fn14]

Curiously, Laud thought Rupert a candidate for the church: he told the king that his nephew would make a good bishop. Perhaps Laud was impressed by Rupert’s recall of his Protestant education and sensed his leadership abilities? Perhaps he wanted to bolster his own position, by having a royal lieutenant? Whatever the archbishop’s calculation, it is hard to think of a man less suited to the cloth than this single-minded warrior.

The queen was equally intrigued by possibilities for Rupert. Henrietta Maria was a distinctive-looking woman whose appearance had recently shocked Rupert’s youngest sister, Sophie: ‘The beautiful portraits of Van Dyck had given me such a fine idea of all the ladies of England, that I was surprised to see that the queen, who I had seen as so beautiful in paintings, was a woman well past her prime. Her arms were long and lean, her shoulders uneven, and some of her teeth were coming out of her mouth like tusks.’[fn15] Against these defects, she had lovely eyes, a pretty nose, and an enviable complexion. She suspected that Rupert was ripe for conversion to Roman Catholicism and worked on him to join her faith. It is not clear where the queen saw the weakness in her nephew’s Protestantism. Rupert certainly enjoyed the rich tastes of the court — the masques, the plays, the art, and the music. By contrast Charles Louis’s Calvinist devotion was much admired by Puritan onlookers.

During his visit, Rupert was tempted by a dramatic proposal, championed by Endymion Porter, a courtier who had introduced the works of Anthony van Dyck to the king. Porter, a warm and sophisticated wit in his late forties, liked the young prince very much and eased him into a literary circle in London that included John Donne and Ben Jonson. Porter was one of many at court seeking a short-cut to riches: he made a decent income from hunting down abusers of commercial practice, but allowed a fertile imagination to take him in increasingly eccentric directions. He became involved in plans for a national treasure hunt and was behind an unsuccessful attempt to foist an unpleasant soap on an unwilling public.

For Rupert, Porter had altogether more ambitious designs: he proposed that the prince establish an English colony on Madagascar, which he could rule as viceroy. It was suggested that Sir William Davenant, who was one of Shakespeare’s godsons (while falsely claiming to be his illegitimate son), would be the island’s poet laureate; an idea that inspired Davenant to write a poem predicting Rupert’s future conquests. At the same time, it was suggested that Charles Louis should be sent to the West Indies, to establish a kingdom. Charles I, who was very fond of Porter, thought these plausible ways of securing income and status for his nephews, and encouraged the schemes’ further investigation by the East India Company.

The refined proposal had Rupert sailing to Madagascar with twelve warships and twenty-four merchantmen. A further twelve ships would be sent with supplies from England each year, before returning with the island’s produce. Madagascar — known to Englishmen at this time as ‘St Lawrence’ — was thought to be fabulously wealthy. A bankrupt merchant called Boothby, eager to profit from the venture, exaggerated its worth, calling it: ‘The chiefest place in the world to enrich men by trade to and from India, Persia, &c. He that is lord of Madagascar, may in good time be emperor of all India.’ He enthused about: ‘The plenty and cheapness of their food, flesh, fowl, and fish, oranges and lemons, sugar, amber-grease, turtle-shells, and drugs.’[fn16]

Despite Boothby’s propaganda and Rupert’s enthusiastic support, the Madagascar scheme stalled. The chief reason was Elizabeth of Bohemia’s blunt dismissal of her boys’ exotic ambitions: ‘As for Rupert’s conquest of Madagascar,’ she wrote, ‘it sounds like one of Don Quixote’s conquests, where he promised his trusty squire to make him king of an island.’[fn17] Elizabeth doubted the project’s feasibility, and thought it bound to compromise Rupert’s safety and honour. She looked to her brother to stop filling her sons’ minds with absurd flights of fancy and to offer more concrete assistance to her dispossessed boys.

Sir Thomas Roe, who as a younger man had explored the mouth of the Amazon and undertaken diplomatic missions to Hindustan, Persia, and Turkey, understood the need to find an outlet for Rupert’s restless energy. He advised Elizabeth of Bohemia: ‘It is an infinite pity that he is not employed according to his genius, for whatsoever he undertakes he doth it vigorously and seriously. His nature is active and spriteful, and may be compared to steel, which is the commanding metal if it be rightly tempered and disposed.’[fn18]

During his nephews’ visit Charles sponsored a fundraising drive, to help equip an army that would regain the Palatinate for Charles Louis. The king wrote a letter, which was read out in every parish, requesting financial aid. Meanwhile, a general subscription was opened, with Lord Craven pledging £10,000 at the top of the list and Charles I signing off at the same rate. With a large sum in his fighting chest, Charles Louis departed for The Hague in June 1637 and set about raising an army.

Rupert accompanied his brother. His family had heard the rumours and become concerned that he was in danger of being won over by Catholics. ‘My brother Rupert is still in great friendship with Porter,’ Charles Louis reported from Whitehall to Elizabeth of Bohemia, ‘yet I cannot but commend his carriage towards me, though when I ask him what he means to do, I find him very shy to tell me his opinion. I bid him take heed he do not meddle with points of religion amongst them, for fear some priest or other, that is too hard for him, may form an ill opinion in him. Besides, M. Condoth frequents that house very often, for Mrs Porter is a professed Roman Catholic. Which way to get my brother away, I do not know, except myself go over.’[fn19]

Rupert was forced to leave England, before he was compromised further. His mother gave a tactful reason for the prince’s need to return to the Continent: ‘Though it be a great honour and happiness to him to wait upon his uncle, yet, his youth considered, he will be better employed to see the wars.’[fn20] There was certainly something in his family’s concerns: Henrietta Maria was sorry to see the prince go, for she felt sure his conversion was imminent. While Rupert was excited at the prospect of fighting for his family’s rights, he was reluctant to bring to an end a thoroughly enjoyable time as his uncle’s guest. The king and his nephew had grown extremely close, and Rupert had found a spiritual home in his kingdom. The prince expressed his love for England with typical enthusiasm while hunting with Charles I on the morning of his departure. He shouted out that he hoped to break his neck, so his bones could remain in England forever. When Rupert left for the Continent that day, his uncle awarded him a monthly pension of 800 crowns.

While Charles Louis went to seek Swedish assistance for his planned campaign, Rupert and Maurice returned to active service. They joined the Prince of Orange’s army as it besieged Breda, the brothers again conspicuous because of their unquestioning bravery. Their most celebrated adventure occurred one night, when they stole up to the city walls and overheard the garrison preparing for a surprise attack on the Dutch. Rupert and Maurice slipped back to their lines and told their commanders what they had learnt. When the Spanish broke out, they were met by ordered ranks of musketeers, whose concerted fire scythed down their sortie and sent the survivors scrambling for safety.

On another occasion a Dutch assault was planned on Breda’s defences. Among the attackers were Goring, Lucas, Monck, and Wilmot, all of whom would have important dealings with the prince in later years. While Frederick Henry of Orange was prepared to risk the lives of these British volunteers, he wanted to protect his great-nephew from the heat of the Spanish firepower and assigned him a secondary role in the operation. Rupert ignored the order, however, and joined the storming party: he was one of the first to breach the fort’s walls. Goring and Wilmot were both wounded in the intense fighting — Goring was left lame for life — but Rupert was unscathed. The successful assault returned Breda to the Dutch after twelve years of Spanish occupation.

Chapter Four

Prisoner of War

‘Rupert’s taking is all. I confess in my passion I did rather wish him killed. I pray God I have not more cause to wish it before he be gotten out.’

Elizabeth of Bohemia, 1638

Charles Louis felt ready to begin his campaign in Germany. While Maurice was sent to complete his education in France, Rupert rejoined his elder brother in Westphalia. At the age of 17, Rupert was given command of one of the three Palatine cavalry regiments. Count Conigsmark controlled the Swedish contingent; the Swedes were no longer the military Juggernaut of Gustavus Adolphus’s time, but they were still highly respected troops. There was also a sizeable British unit, many of whom romantically believed themselves to be serving as knights errant for Elizabeth, the Winter Queen. Less altruistic was a Scottish general, James King, whose part in Rupert’s life story was to be consistently disappointing. This polyglot army of Charles Louis’s numbered just 4,000: ‘too many for a raid, too few for a serious campaign’,[fn1] as one of Rupert’s military biographers has pointed out.

Setting off eastwards from Bentheim, the small force was soon in action. Rupert was riding with the advanced guard near Rheine when attacked by a unit twice the size of his detachment. The prince drew up his men and, for the first time, ordered the manoeuvre that would become his signature piece: the full-blooded cavalry charge. The enemy reacted, in a manner that would become familiar to Rupert, by breaking formation and fleeing in terror, pursued by his men’s slashing blades all the way back to the town. ‘We must not pass over one remarkable providence more upon this adventure’, the prince’s secretary later recalled, ‘a soldier, with a screwed gun, snapped at the Prince within ten yards of his body, but happily missed fire.’[fn2]

Joy at the outcome of this skirmish was short-lived. The Imperialist high command now knew the exact position of Charles Louis’s army and appreciated how small it was. A nearby force under General Hartzfeldt was despatched to annihilate it. Hartzfeldt realised that the Palatine army’s only possible escape route through the surrounding high land lay via the Minden Gap. Charles Louis would have to approach this via Vlotho (also known as Flota), where he could cross the River Weser. When the Protestants arrived at the pass, however, an army as diverse as their own stood before them. The main body of the cavalry was Austrian, the infantry was mixed, and the dragoons, commanded by Colonel Devereux, were Irish. Devereux had gained lasting infamy by murdering Wallenstein, one of the Thirty Years’ War’s great mercenary commanders, in 1634.

The battle that took place at Vlotho on 17 October 1638 was a one-sided affair. This was largely owing to Conigsmark’s inept leadership. He drew up his men in a narrow gorge in four rows, the third of which was commanded by Rupert, while he rode in the comparative safety of the fourth. The impact of the Imperial heavy cavalry against this static defence was devastating: the front two lines, comprised of Palatine cavalry, buckled and broke in the first moments of battle.

Rupert now found himself directing the front line of his brother’s army. Clad in full armour, his visor down, and with Lords Grandison and Northampton by his side, he led his men forward at the charge. The enemy cuirassiers faltered, and then fled the field, pursued by Rupert’s force. However, inexplicably, Conigsmark failed to reinforce the counterattack. Rupert suddenly found himself far from his own lines, surrounded by superior numbers of Imperialists under Marshal Gotz. Lord Craven tried to come to the prince’s assistance, leading forward two troops of Charles Louis’s lifeguards. This brave intervention was too small to succeed: the Austrian cavalry rolled up Rupert and Craven’s men, sending them back into the gorge where they had started the battle. As they milled around in confusion, they were caught in a flanking attack. The Imperialists charged down the hillside and joined in the massacre of the prince’s men. Rupert was only spared from the slaughter because, by chance, he was wearing a white band in his helmet, similar to the one that the Austrians were sporting that day.