PRINCE RUPERT
THE LAST CAVALIER
Charles Spencer

Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

This edition first published by Endeavour Press Ltd. in 2014

First published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2007

Copyright © Charles Spencer, 2007

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Charles Spencer asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Ebook Edition © September 2020 ISBN: 9780008373252

Version: 2020-07-28

Dedication

TO LARA

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter One: Baptism of Fire

Chapter Two: Childhood

Chapter Three: Boy Soldier

Chapter Four: Prisoner of War

Chapter Five: To His Uncle’s Aid

Chapter Six: Edgehill

Chapter Seven: The Curse of Parliament

Chapter Eight: Faction Fighting

Chapter Nine: Rushing to Defeat

Chapter Ten: Commander of the King’s Forces

Chapter Eleven: No Hope of Better Things

Chapter Twelve: A Matter of Honour

Chapter Thirteen: French General

Chapter Fourteen: General at Sea

Chapter Fifteen: Pirate Prince

Chapter Sixteen: Suffering for the Cause

Chapter Seventeen: Maurice

Chapter Eighteen: Wilderness Years

Chapter Nineteen: Restoration

Chapter Twenty: Man of War

Chapter Twenty-One: Joint Command

Chapter Twenty-Two: ‘Sadtroublesome Times’

Chapter Twenty-Three: The Happiest Old Cur in the Nation

Chapter Twenty-Four: Windsor Castle

Chapter Twenty-Five: Hudson’s Bay

Chapter Twenty-Six: The Wrong Enemy

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Death of a Cavalier

Footnotes

Bibliography

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Introduction

Prince Rupert of the Rhine — it’s a name touched in equal parts by glamour and glory, defeat and disappointment. The poster boy of the Royalist cause, Rupert attracted the unrestrained bile of Parliament’s busy propagandists. They poured out pamphlets besmirching the aims and intentions of the king’s talismanic nephew. His reputation has never fully recovered. However, he has never wanted for admirers: his many portraits show a good-looking and intelligent man, confident and focused. If opinions on the prince are divided, this has long been the case. He achieved his contentious status during some of the most divisive years in British history, which saw Charles I fighting Parliament in the English Civil War.

Those casually acquainted with the conflicts of the 1640s usually know something of the prince’s military reputation — most likely that he was the leader of thundering cavalry charges, which overwhelmed opponents with the shock of their initial impetus, before spinning off the battlefield in woeful indiscipline. There is certainly truth in this popular image: at the first and last of the great Civil War battles, Rupert’s troops sliced effortlessly through the enemy, then galloped after their foes instead of regrouping and re-engaging. At Edgehill, this unruliness robbed the king of victory. At Naseby, massively outnumbered, Royalist failure was probably inevitable, but the early absence of the prince and his squadrons made defeat certain and complete.

At 6 foot 4 inches tall, the sheer physical presence of Rupert was difficult to ignore. He attracted enormous attention from contemporaries. To his followers, he was a man ‘whose very name was half a conquest’. The Marquess of Newcastle, a key Royalist grandee in northern England, wrote to the prince on this theme: ‘Your name is grown so triumphant, and the world’s expectations to look for more from you than man can do; but that is their fault, Sir, and not yours. Long may you live … a terror to your uncle’s enemies, and a preserver of his servants.’

The enemy viewed him in a more apocalyptic light: a Scottish observer, writing in 1644, summoned an awful image of the prince’s approach of the city of York: ‘The manner briefly was thus, Rupert, or the second Nimrod, the mighty Plunderer, the beginning of whose kingdom is confusion, comes in his hunting carrier, with his fellow hunters, and near 20,000 bloodhounds attending them, all more ravenous than wolves, and fiercer than tigers, thirsting for blood.’ To Parliament, the prince was a figure of terror.

When examining Rupert’s life, it is important to do so against a time line: the headline events frequently occurred when he was still very young. Born the son of a newly crowned king and queen, he embarked on a life of exile while still an infant. He gained a reputation as a notable soldier in his teens, exhibiting examples of the courage that marked his life and which frequently verged on the insane. Eventually he was taken prisoner of war. He endured years of incarceration, with periods of genuine deprivation and hardship. However, he used this time to develop his interests in art and science (which would remain dear to him throughout his life), and also experienced his first love — with his gaoler’s daughter.

The prince was returned to freedom as the clouds of civil warfare settled over England. Aged 22, he arrived in time to take command of his uncle’s 800 horsemen, and set about reinforcing and transforming them. They quickly became an eye-catching strike force. Dismissed by Parliament as demonic ‘cavaliers’, loose-living rapists and pillagers, Rupert moulded them into the most feared and effective part of the Royalist army.

The myth of the prince and his cavaliers evolved early in the conflict. On a warm day in the autumn of 1642, Rupert, his brother Maurice, and several of their comrades took time off from convoy duty to lie on the grass near Powick Bridge. Their breastplates lay beside them, while their horses grazed nearby. Suddenly the princes spotted the Life Guard of the Earl of Essex, the enemy lord general, riding towards them at the head of a significant force.

Logic dictated a speedy retreat to the safety of nearby Worcester. Instead, Rupert shouted to his officers to follow him. He then sprung onto his horse and immediately galloped directly at the rebels. The rest of the Royalists went after their young general as quickly as they could: the first proper engagement of the Civil War was joined.

Perhaps only fifty rebels were slain at Powick Bridge, but the significance of the day lay beyond the body count. Parliament had anticipated a short campaign, with speedy victory over a king who was believed to be unpopular and poorly equipped for warfare, but this reverse caused a huge dent to morale at Westminster. Several prominent rebel officers were among the dead and Rupert had shown that his gallantry, and that of his devoted followers, stood between Parliament and victory.

The English Civil War was the backdrop to Rupert’s most famous exploits. His flair on the battlefield led to hopes of finishing off Parliament, in 1643. However, Rupert found he faced enemies who were harder to defeat than those arrayed against him on the battlefield: his colleagues in the king’s council of war were divided, several of them suspicious and resentful of the young, foreign princeling, who enjoyed Charles I’s full favour. The Royalist cause was hamstrung by these internal divisions, which reduced Rupert to smouldering resentment. Meanwhile, Parliament refined its resources, and trained an army of a calibre that the king never possessed.

The prince became increasingly senior, militarily. Victories in the north were nullified by his humiliating defeat at Marston Moor. Naseby followed. His nadir came with the surrender of Bristol, then England’s second city, which allowed Rupert’s enemies to portray him, completely unfairly, as treacherous to the king. As Charles I spiralled towards ultimate defeat, he was ready to believe anything — even that his nephew was responsible for his key reverses. The weak monarch suspected his sister’s son, who was one of his most loyal commanders, rather than question the conniving courtiers who hated the bloodied hero.

After the Civil War, Rupert found brief employment in Louis XIV’s armies. However, he always had one ear cocked, waiting for the summons to serve his uncle’s cause once more. When the call came, he ignored his lack of experience at sea to lead the Royalist navy. It was a difficult assignment, which nobody else wanted. Rupert’s most heroic years followed, as he kept the Stuart banner flying while Parliament triumphed everywhere else. However, the effort of survival was enormous and exacted a heavy cost. The remainder of the prince’s life betrayed the ravages to his health incurred on royal duty.

When tackling Rupert’s life story, I was determined that only a third of the text should cover the key Civil War years of 1642-5: for a man who lived into his sixties, it seemed ridiculous to allot any more space to the four years that established his reputation. Fortunately, the rest of Prince Rupert’s days were filled with fascinating events, as his enquiring mind and his restless spirit took him in a variety of directions.

Every subject of a biography is, of course, to some extent, a product of his or her age. Of Rupert this is particularly so: his experiences, tastes, and interests were reflective of those preoccupying many European aristocrats and princes in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. He was enmeshed in one war after the other, hoping that battlefield success would lead to riches and glory. While he was a brilliant and charismatic cavalry general, he never progressed to successful overall command. However, soldiery — on land and sea — remained his vocation into late middle age.

His wider pursuits were typical of an active patrician with a good brain — many of his hobbies coincided with those of his first cousin, Charles II. Both men, predictably, enjoyed hunting and shooting, pursued actresses (although Rupert’s conquests were paltry in comparison to the king’s plenty), and played energetic tennis: Rupert was reputedly the finest player in England.

However, not all energies were expended in the bedroom and on the sports’ field. Rupert, like Charles II, had a burning interest in science. The Restoration coincided with an expansion of knowledge in chemistry, 1661 seeing the appearance of Robert Boyle’s The Sceptical Chymist, as well as the foundation of the Royal Society. Rupert was one of its first members. He was never afraid to dirty his own hands, spending happy, sweat-drenched, hours labouring in his laboratory and at his foundry. The Prince’s inventions mainly had a military theme, but he also brought mezzotint engraving to Britain. Some believe that he devised the process.

Financial insecurity was Rupert’s constant spur. It explains his never-ending pursuit of business schemes: he was determined to slough off the poverty bequeathed him as a younger son of a dispossessed royal family. The most enduring legacy of this search for wealth is the Hudson’s Bay Company, which the prince established and championed. It opened up vast areas of what is now Canada. The town of Prince Rupert, just south of the Alaskan/Canadian border, is a reminder of Rupert’s interest in North American trade and exploration.

Why write a biography of Prince Rupert now? There have been times when Rupert was better known than is currently the case. Eliot Warburton’s three volumes in the 1840s brought to light much of the correspondence and commentary attached to the glory days of this fascinating man. Subsequent biographies have also tended to concentrate on the Civil War years: there were three such works in 1976 alone. More recently, Frank Kitson has divided Rupert’s military career into two distinct phases — his years as a young general, and those as a middle-aged admiral — and analysed both.

My book looks at the whole man, as well as the context of his life. It does not claim to contain a definitive study of the Civil War, nor of the later Anglo-Dutch Wars. I have instead endeavoured to tell the tale of an intriguing individual, who frightened and inspired his contemporaries, and who was at the centre of a succession of fierce, personal quarrels. His particular foes were George Digby, a foppish courtier, and Samuel Pepys, the inspired naval bureaucrat most often remembered for his diaries.

Rupert was not an easy man. He was a cavalier, but certainly not of the laughing variety. At his best, he was serious, loyal, inspirational, and incisive. At his worst, he was arrogant, inflexible, and irascible. However, he lived life with passion and energy. He regarded himself as a man who would always do the right thing, whatever the cost. His lack of compromise was at once his greatest gift and his most significant impediment.

Prince Rupert of the Rhine hails from a different era, but his conflicting complexities are recognisable to all today that have a broad and compassionate view of the human condition. Writing his latest biography has left me an admirer of this fascinating man, accepting of his shortcomings, and in awe of his extraordinary physical courage. Above all, it is the range of his experiences that is most startling. It is hard to believe that one man packed so much into a single lifetime.

Chapter One
Baptism of Fire

‘Swaddled in Armour, Drums appeasd thy Cries, And the Shrill Trumpet sang thy Lullabies.’

Thomas Flatman, On the Death of the Illustrious Prince Rupert, a Pindarique Ode

Rupert was born in Prague on 17 December 1619, at half past ten at night. He was the third son, and fourth child, of a union that exuded glamour and promised glory. His mother Elizabeth was a British princess famed as a romantic icon throughout the Continent. His father Frederick V was Count Palatine, one of the foremost Protestant princes of Europe. ‘From thy noble Pedigree,’ Rupert’s eulogist would conclude, ‘The Royal Blood … sparked in thy veins.’[fn1] The princeling’s royal heritage was of a north and middle European stamp: his grandmothers were princesses, one Danish, the other Dutch; his maternal grandfather was James I of England. When James heard that his only surviving daughter had produced a new grandson, he pressed a purse of gold coins into the messenger’s hands, before ordering the drinking of toasts.

Frederick and Elizabeth invited their subjects to file past their baby. Rupert lay in an ebony cradle — a symbol of the rich luxury that they assumed would be his lifelong companion. Another of his gifts was a silver ship, a prophetic offering, for some of Rupert’s most fascinating and challenging years would be at sea. Since he was native-born, unlike his two older brothers, there were calls for Rupert to be declared heir to his parents’ new kingdom — a proposal that failed in the Bohemian parliament by one vote. However, the neighbouring territory of Lusatia proclaimed Rupert as its prince.

Rupert’s christening took place on 31 March 1620, a contemporary recording: ‘The solemnity of his baptism was very extraordinary, there being present the King himself, his brother, two princes of the House of Saxony, the Duke of Anhalt, Elector of Hohenloe, with many other persons of eminent condition …’[fn2] He was named after an ancestor who had been Emperor between 1400 and 1410, Rupert the Clement. The young prince inherited his forebear’s Christian name, not his disposition.

Bethlem Gabor was chosen as godfather: he was a formidable, Transylvanian, nobleman who claimed the throne of Hungary. Unable to attend the christening in person, he sent Count Thurtzo to represent him. The count, in body armour, received the infant from the priest and held him: a gesture that signalled his absent master’s duty of guardianship. Thurtzo then passed Rupert to the deputies of the Bohemian dependencies, who were also encased in armour. The sight of breastplates and swords in a cathedral was indicative of the close intertwining of the religious and the military in early seventeenth-century Europe. This was a time when senior ecclesiastical figures were at the centre of politics and lay princes were entrusted with spiritual duties.

Rupert’s father had recently, by request, become King of Bohemia, with Elizabeth his queen. The Bohemian nobility needed a Protestant champion to replace, and then stand up to, the Catholic Habsburgs, whom they had recently overthrown. Frederick, after much agonising, had agreed to take on the role. Rarely can the acceptance of an invitation have sparked such colossal devastation. Rupert’s birth took place after the fuse had been lit and just before the powder keg went up. Even as the boy’s arrival was celebrated, plans were forming in Catholic Europe that would impact fatally on his parents’ rule and set the newborn’s life on its helter-skelter course.

*

When Rupert’s parents married, in 1613, it was the conclusion of his mother’s exhaustive search for a suitable husband. By the standards of the age, Elizabeth’s clean features and height marked her out as handsome. Her lineage and charm persuaded people, somewhat against the evidence of her portraits, to declare her a great beauty. There was, however, no doubting her personality. Elizabeth had a confidence and sparkle inherited from her charismatic grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots. Unfortunately, Elizabeth would also match her tragic ancestress for heartbreak.

The princess was seven when her father left Scotland to assume the English throne. It had been left vacant by the death of the girl’s godmother, Elizabeth I. From the start young ‘Lady Elizabeth’ was hugely popular, provoking delighted admiration and praise from all who met her. James believed that royal children prospered better if kept away from the distractions of court life, so Elizabeth was handed over to an aristocratic couple, Lord and Lady Harington — ‘persons eminent for prudence and piety’[fn3] — for a strict education. The reports from their residence at Combe Abbey, near Coventry, were consistently enthusiastic: ‘With God’s assistance’, Lord Harington wrote, ‘we hope to do our Lady Elizabeth such service as is due to her princely endowments and natural abilities; both which appear the sweet dawning of future comfort to her royal father.’[fn4]

This princess of rare qualities was celebrated throughout the kingdom. If the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 had been successful in blowing up James and his sons, the conspirators had intended to kidnap Elizabeth, have her crowned, and bring her up a Catholic. ‘What a queen should I have been by this means!’ she said when told of the plan, ‘I had rather have been with my Royal Father in the Parliament House, than wear his Crown on such condition.’[fn5]

As womanhood approached Elizabeth’s hand became much sought after overseas. The French ambassador met the princess when she was 11 and was captivated by her poise. ‘I assure you’, he reported to Paris, ‘that it will not be her fault if she is not dauphiness — and she might have worse fancies — for she is not at all vexed when it is mentioned to her.’[fn6] Sir Walter Raleigh thought Elizabeth ‘by nature and education endowed with such princely perfections, both of body and mind, as may well deserve to be reputed a worthy spouse for the greatest monarch in Christendom’.[fn7] Her lengthy list of failed suitors included the kings of Sweden and Spain, the Dauphin of France, and Maurice of Nassau, the Dutch leader.

The collapse of the Spanish suit helps to explain Elizabeth’s eventual choice of husband. James I had hoped that such a union would underline the end of hostilities between England and Spain, and advertise his wise and peace-loving kingship. However, his heir, Prince Henry, spoke for the majority of Englishmen when loudly rejecting his sister’s sacrifice to Popery. ‘The prince hath publicly said’, the Spanish ambassador was shocked to note, ‘that whosoever should counsel his father to marry his sister to a Catholic prince, were a traitor, and that it cannot be but to kill him and his brother, and make the succession theirs; he is a great heretic!’[fn8]

The most obvious Protestant match was the gifted Swedish prince, Gustavus Adolphus. However, Sweden was at war with Denmark, and the Danish king was Elizabeth’s maternal uncle, so this option fell away. Of the other choices, Frederick V, Count Palatine, was the candidate who stood out. He was the Palsgrave, or ‘Palace Count’, a role his family had filled since the tenth century. As such, he was the senior Protestant prince of the Holy Roman Empire — that hotchpotch of 300 Germanic, Bohemian, Lowland, and Italian lands, which was among the largest realms in Europe. The Count Palatine was one of the seven electors (the other six electors were the Archbishops of Cologne, Mainz, and Trier, and the King of Bohemia, the Duke of Saxony, and the Margrave of Brandenburg) charged by a fourteenth-century Papal Bull with the appointment of the Emperor. However, since the late Middle Ages, the throne — along with those of Hungary and Bohemia — had effectively become the possession of the Habsburg dynasty.

Frederick’s upbringing had more breadth to it than Elizabeth’s cloistered childhood. He had completed his education in Sedan, at the house of his uncle, the Duke of Bouillon. French was the main language spoken at Heidelberg, so this was an opportunity to progress to faultless fluency. His tutor was Tilenus, a Calvinist who stressed the need to guard against the evils of Catholicism. He planted in his pupil the lifelong conviction that the Pope, his Jesuit foot soldiers, and his Spanish Habsburg allies, were conspiring to undermine the rest of Europe for their own gain.

Religion was the cornerstone of a varied education. Frederick became a fine dancer, an adept swordsman, and an accomplished rider. By the time that he inherited the electorate, on his father’s death in 1610, Frederick had the makings of the perfect prince: he was devout, polished, and manly. The following year, when James I took discreet soundings about Frederick’s character and prospects from Bouillon, he received an enthusiastic critique: a perfect physique, a dark complexion and handsome face; a natural athleticism, particularly on horseback; a serious faith and pure morals; a wonderful portfolio of houses, including exquisite hunting lodges; and, when he came of age, arguably the most important electorate of the Holy Roman Empire. Eligibility was not a problem.

However, many in England had expected Elizabeth to marry a king. A prince, albeit one of Frederick’s fine pedigree, was considered too humble a match for the ‘Pearl of Britain’. Protestant supporters of the marriage felt it necessary to stress the importance of the Palatinate to the disappointed: ‘Now for his Highness’s Country’, wrote one of James I’s chaplains, ‘it is neither so small, unfruitful, or mean, as is by some supposed. It is in length about 200 English miles, the lower and the upper country. In the lower the Prince hath 26 walled towns, besides an infinite number of good and fair villages, 22 houses; and the land is very fruitful of wine, corn, and other comfortable fruits for man’s use, having the Rhine and the Neckar running through it. The upper Country hath not so many walled towns and princely houses, but those that are, be generally fairer than in the lower, especially Amberg and Newmarket [sic].’[fn9]

It was Frederick’s devotion to Protestantism, and his tolerance of all its forms, that ultimately secured Elizabeth’s hand. Since 1555, the rulers of each part of the Holy Roman Empire had been permitted to choose their territory’s official religion. This concession helped to defuse the tension between Roman Catholics and Protestants. Since 1562, with one short-lived aberration, the count’s family had been solidly Calvinist, while its capital, Heidelberg, was known for its religious and intellectual enlightenment. ‘We have to bless God’, wrote an English translator of Palatine scriptures, in 1614, ‘for the religious care of our dread sovereign, in matching his only daughter, a princess peerless, with a Prince of that soundness of religion as the Prince Elector is.’[fn10]

Although the princess’s mother, Anne of Denmark, was a Catholic sympathiser, her father’s succession to the English throne had been conditional on his promise to uphold Anglicanism. The English Establishment, which had so hurriedly welcomed James, already viewed him with concern. Nobles were appalled by his sale of hereditary titles, which introduced rich parvenus to the aristocracy. Furthermore, his rampant homosexuality was considered troubling in a king, partly on moral grounds, but more practically because his good-looking young favourites bypassed the conventional channels of patronage to gorge themselves on ill-deserved honours.

A sure way for James to regain some popularity was to play the religious card: in 1612 he took England into the Protestant Union, a defensive confederation of nine German principalities and seventeen imperial cities formed by Frederick’s father, and which the young Palsgrave now led. The same year, he agreed that Elizabeth should wed Frederick. The public preacher in Bristol — England’s second city and a place that was to play an important role in Rupert’s adult life — welcomed the betrothal: ‘Unto you happy Prince, and sent of God to increase our happiness’, he said in an open letter, ‘Come in thou blessed of the Lord, for whom the choicest pearl in the Christian world is by God himself prepared. The Lord makes her like Leah and like Rahel [sic], which two builded the house of Israel. Let her grow into thousand thousands, and let her seed possess the gate of his enemies.’[fn11]

It was expected for princes and princesses to make dynastic marriages. Rupert’s parents were unusual in that theirs was a genuine love match, whose romantic pulse never slowed. Frederick made a sublime impression, on arriving in England. His ‘well-becoming confidence’[fn12] was noted, as was his ‘wit, courage and judgement’.[fn13] Elizabeth was relieved to be marrying such a dashing young man: when Prince Maurice of Nassau had been presented as a possible mate, she had been repelled by the physical decay of his advanced middle age. By contrast, she fell quickly and completely in love with her handsome, youthful suitor.

The 16-year-old couple, only four days apart in age, married in Whitehall Chapel on St Valentine’s Day, 1613. Elizabeth wore a gold crown, her white dress and loosely hanging hair advertising her virginity. Despite the bride’s simplicity, James managed to spend nearly £100,000 on the celebrations, prompting one of his courtiers to offer a cheerless supplication: ‘God grant money to pay debts.’[fn14] However, the revelry was not only about fleeting extravagance: William Shakespeare offered an enduring wedding gift, writing a play for the couple. The Tempest was performed fourteen times by the King’s Men during the festivities, for which the players received £150. The Archbishop of Canterbury summed up the hopes of all who witnessed the match: ‘The God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob bless these nuptials, and make them prosperous to these kingdoms and to his Church.’[fn15]

Frederick left for home ahead of his bride so that he could be in the Palatinate to receive her. Elizabeth travelled with a train of supporters that, by the time it reached the outskirts of Heidelberg, consisted of 12 princes, 30 earls, 1,000 gentlemen, and 2,000 soldiers. Her arrival was greeted with volleys of musket shot and salvoes of cannon fire from the Palatine army. ‘Then they marched altogether orderly in good array,’ wrote an eyewitness, ‘conducting her to Heidelberg, where the citizens wanted no expressions of joy, love, and duty in hearty welcoming of her, & praying for her; all windows being replenished with people of all ages and degrees, and the streets thronged with multitudes of people, drawn thither from all parts, not so much to see the Pageants that were erected to further this honourable entertainment, as to have their eyes filled in beholding of her Highness, whom all honoured and admired.’[fn16]

Frederick and Elizabeth enjoyed six happy years in Heidelberg. The prince enlarged the pink, sandstone castle for his wife, adding a suite of ten rooms — ‘the English wing’ — to welcome her to her new home. The castle’s floors were made of porphyry, while the cornices were inlaid with gems. Elizabeth’s drawing room was hung with silver decorations, against a background of white marble. The library, with its priceless codices, housed one of the greatest book collections in Europe.

Outside, the Electress’s passion for animals found expression in a monkey-house and a generously proportioned menagerie. The palace garden, the Tiortus Palatinatus’, was famous throughout the Continent, delighting visitors with its system of fountains, its fine statues, and its intricate network of flowerbeds. When an heir, Frederick Henry, was born, Frederick showed his delight by planting an extension to the garden under his wife’s bedroom window: it was laid out with English flowers, to remind the princess of home. Two more children quickly appeared, Elizabeth and Charles Louis, before she fell pregnant with Rupert.

*

The Palatine shared a border with Bohemia. In July 1617, Ferdinand of Austria, a Habsburg prince, was appointed king-elect. The crown was supposedly decided by a vote of the Bohemian nobles, but they felt bypassed and believed that Ferdinand had been foisted on them through trickery. The intensity of Ferdinand’s Catholic faith soon became clear: the new king’s daily routine included several hours in religious meditation and attendance at two masses. Ferdinand reneged on previous assurances and brought in a raft of measures to root out Protestantism in Bohemia, including control of the printing presses. To English diplomats, this made him ‘a silly Jesuited soul’,[fn17] but his leading subjects declined to regard his actions with such lightness. Catholic fanaticism had no place in Prague: the city had produced the fifteenth-century martyr John Hus, burnt to death for questioning Roman orthodoxy. Hus had left behind a tradition of religious tolerance, independence, and diversity: the Hussite majority harmoniously co-existed with Catholics, Calvinists, and even the extreme Church of the Bohemian Brethren.

In May 1618 Ferdinand went too far, ordering the destruction of two Protestant churches in the capital. This prompted a rebellion, led by the Bohemian nobility. Their representatives cornered the two Habsburg regents and their secretary in the council chamber of Hradcany Castle and hurled them from its upper windows. One of the victims, the hefty Jaraslas Martinitz, called out ‘Jesu Maria! Help!’ as he was ejected. The second, Vilem Slavata, clung onto the sill for his life, only loosening his grip when knocked unconscious. Their secretary, Philipus Fabricius, was so terrified by the violence he had witnessed that he put up barely a struggle.

Astonishingly, all three men survived the 80-foot drop, prompting Catholics to celebrate the miraculous intervention of the Blessed Virgin. In fact, salvation had arrived in a more humdrum form: the trio’s billowing cloaks had acted as parachutes, and slowed their fall, before a slurry-pit had cushioned their landing. ‘The Defenestration of Prague’ was a suitably dramatic prelude to the horrors of the ensuing conflict, the Thirty Years’ War.

As Ferdinand arranged avenging armies, the Bohemians sought a new king. After refusals from their first choices, they turned to Frederick to fill the void. He agonised about the decision: his Huguenot and Dutch uncles, his chancellor, as well as his spiritual sense of duty, all told him to consent, but his mother and his father-in-law strongly advised against. The Palsgrave’s family motto was: ‘Rule me, Lord, according to your word.’ Frederick became convinced that God expected him to grasp the opportunity placed before him, for His sake. However, when he eventually agreed to accept the crown, he did so with a sense of deep foreboding. On a dull day in October 1619, waved off by his tearful mother, Frederick rode out with the heavily pregnant Elizabeth by his side, accompanied by young Frederick Henry. It was the last time any of them would see Heidelberg.

*

The omens were initially favourable: the people of Prague noted that the arrival of their new rulers coincided with several days when none of the capital’s civil population died. However, it soon became apparent that Frederick had underestimated the risk he was taking by overestimating the level of support for his cause. Beside his Palatine army of 15,000 men, he had assumed he could also rely on the troops of the Protestant Union. This network of religious allies included several Germanic lands, England, the Dutch United Provinces, Venice, Denmark, and Sweden. But within days of the start of Frederick’s rule, all his calculations were in disarray, for Ferdinand was elected Holy Roman Emperor. This altered everything. The Palsgrave, the Imperial right-hand man, now found himself in armed conflict with his feudal overlord. Many of his German allies found they could not draw their sword against their sovereign master.

Frederick had the opportunity to back down, but two months later he confirmed his acceptance of the crown. Ferdinand, initially unsure of his strength, persisted in urging Frederick to withdraw from Bohemia and return to Heidelberg. If he failed to do this by 1 June 1620, Ferdinand promised, he would attract an Imperial ban. This would place him, and anyone who assisted him, outside the law. Frederick could now be in no doubt: by accepting the throne that wiser men had rejected, and by challenging the orthodoxy of which he was supposed to be the champion, he had raised the possibility of losing everything.

The conduct of Frederick’s allies ushered cataclysm closer. In July, French diplomats persuaded the Protestant Union to remain neutral, while Bohemia faced the consequences of its rebellion alone. Meanwhile, the timing of Frederick’s call for help could not have reached the Dutch United Provinces at a worse time: after decades of fighting for their survival, they were now in the final stages of a truce with Spain, and were gearing up for renewed warfare with the old enemy on their borders. The United Provinces did little more than cheer Frederick on from the sidelines, hoping that his bid for power would succeed, while unable to lend adequate support: some money and 1,500 troops was all they could spare. Similarly, the Swedes and their warrior king, Gustavus Adolphus, were embroiled in a struggle with Poland: they sent Frederick just eight cannon; a pitiful contribution, but more than the Danes and the Venetians mustered between them. In the meantime Bethlem Gabor, Rupert’s supposed protector and Frederick’s sworn ally, chose to pursue his own campaign in Hungary, rather than redirect his forces to help in Bohemia.

The greatest disappointment was James I’s response. He had discouraged his son-in-law from taking the crown of another monarch, and had underlined his disapproval by refusing to send an ambassador to either Frederick or Elizabeth’s coronations. James remained adamant that, as a divinely appointed monarch, he could not raise an army to help a usurper — even if that usurper was his son-in-law. James’s finances were so weak that the task of funding a foreign army was probably beyond him. However, the king’s unhelpfulness was out of kilter with public sentiment: the English held collections for their popular princess and her handsome husband, seeing their cause as fundamentally important in blocking Papist aggression in Europe. These raised £80,000 and produced a small army of 2,250 men. For the Palsgrave, this was nothing like enough.

Emperor Ferdinand, meanwhile, received generous assistance from Catholic allies. Pope Paul V donated 380,000 florins to the Emperor’s cause. Philip III of Spain gave 3 million ducats and sent an army from Flanders under Marquis Spinola. King Sigismund III of Poland, concerned that Frederick was prepared to negotiate with the hated Turks, despatched Cossacks to help suppress the Bohemian revolt.

In the meantime, Saxony, though Protestant, sided with the Emperor. The Elector, John George, was an alcoholic Lutheran who had turned down the Bohemian crown before it was offered to Frederick. He would not allow his Calvinist rival to profit from a gamble that he had declined. Ferdinand’s election as Emperor gave the Saxon an excuse to turn against Frederick: in fighting defiant rebels, he claimed, he was upholding his princely duty to his sovereign lord.

A sizeable force also assembled under the banner of the Catholic League, an alliance of twenty princes sworn to counter the Protestant Union. Its founder was Maximilian, Duke of Bavaria — a Wittelsbach cousin of Frederick’s, who was famed for his penny-pinching greed. He sent an army to assist under Count Tilly, a brilliant Walloon general. Maximilian extracted a secret promise from Ferdinand: if he achieved victory for the Emperor, his reward would be the Palatine electorate.

At the time of Rupert’s birth, Frederick’s enemies comprised a rich array of Imperialists, Catholic Leaguers, and Spaniards. There were 55,000 of them and they were converging on Prague.

*

Kings of Bohemia had a military tradition: one blind predecessor of Frederick’s had fought for France at the battle of Crecy, in 1346. When informed that the day belonged to the English, he ordered his men to lead his horse forward by the bridle, charging into the carnage of defeat. He and his son perished side by side, choosing death with honour over flight or imprisonment. Frederick, the new king, had no experience as a soldier, his military knowledge limited to the regulated tournaments that were a popular diversion at court. Yet now he was commander-in-chief of an army of 35,000 men, who were poorly fed and suffering from low morale. The civilian population was equally dispirited.

The king and queen had forfeited much of the good will that had greeted their arrival in Bohemia. Instead of providing tolerant rule, Frederick had allowed his chief adviser, Abraham Scultetus, to pursue a dogmatic, Calvinist agenda. When Scultetus secretly ordered the felling of an ancient crucifix on Prague’s Charles Bridge, there was outrage. Elizabeth had already alienated many influential subjects because of her apparent frivolity, her revealing décolletage provoking indignation among the ladies, and her lack of punctuality causing consternation among courtiers and churchmen alike. Now she openly supported Scultetus against his critics and was seen to be contemptuous of her subjects’ most dearly held customs and beliefs.

The decisive battle took place against this backcloth of discontent. On 8 November 1620 the two armies faced each other 5 miles to the west of the capital, on the broad summit of White Mountain. Despite his lesser numbers, Frederick’s defensive position was strong: his men were deployed at the top of a ridge, protected by a stream and earthworks. However, the Protestants had failed to dig in as well as they might, complaining that their old spades were useless against the frozen ground.

Assured by his general, Prince Christian of Anhalt, that the enemy would not strike, Frederick returned to Prague for breakfast. Meanwhile, under a blanket of fog, Tilly pushed his army across the stream that separated the two armies and launched a surprise attack. It was not only the Protestants who were taken unawares: when Tilly’s colleague, Carlos Bonaventura Bucquoy, learnt of this risky manoeuvre, he called for an immediate council of war. Here the two generals clashed furiously, their tactical deadlock threatening a paralysis that would play into the Bohemians’ hands.

It was at this point that Father Dominicus, a Carmelite monk from Maximilian of Bavaria’s retinue, stepped forward. He humbly asked permission to speak. Given the floor, Father Dominicus started his address calmly, before being transformed by religious fervour into an impassioned orator. He told the commanders it was God’s undoubted will that they attack the rebel Bohemians: He would ensure victory against an heretical enemy; they need only be the instruments of divine retribution. The Father’s inspired words put fire in the bellies of the Catholic high command. They resumed the action with unity, confidence, and energy.

It was all over in an hour. Four thousand of Frederick’s men were killed or captured, including four of his generals. All his artillery and one hundred of his standards were also taken. The king only arrived at the battlefield in time to see his army utterly broken. He then rushed back to the city that had so briefly been his capital, to find pandemonium in the streets. Recognising his defeat, Frederick sent to Maximilian of Bavaria, requesting twenty-four hours’ grace in which to gather his belongings and quit the city. Maximilian was not feeling generous: he granted his defeated cousin just eight hours to be gone. The royal family and its retinue frantically loaded up their carriages, ready for flight. In the panic, Frederick left behind the Bohemian crown, orb and sceptre.

Prince Rupert was also mislaid. His nurse had placed him on a sofa while she packed and then had either forgotten or deserted him. Christopher Dhona, an intellectual attached to the court from Heidelberg University, was conducting a final sweep of the palace when he was startled to hear the cries of a baby coming from the saloon. He discovered Rupert on the floor, screaming in protest after rolling off the sofa. Dhona scooped up the baby, wrapped him tight, and sprinted to the courtyard. Seeing the last Palatine coach departing, he ran alongside it and tossed the prince through its window. Rupert slipped into the boot where he bounced around among the fugitives’ crammed belongings. Again, the strength of his lungs saved him: the coach’s occupants heard his screams and pulled him to safety while the carriage sped out of Prague’s gates. However, Rupert’s mother was not at hand. Elizabeth was consoling Frederick, and comforting a lady-in-waiting. One of them had lost a kingdom that day, the other a husband.

The fugitives made for Silesia, a neighbouring Bohemian dependency. Elizabeth was in the final trimester of pregnancy and a halt was called at Glatz, so she might rest for a few days. The party then moved on to Breslau, the Silesian capital, where Frederick stayed to organise resistance. He sent his wife, Frederick Henry, and Rupert on to Brandenburg. Frederick was sure the Margrave of Brandenburg would help: he was a fellow Protestant Elector and the husband of Frederick’s sister, Charlotte. However, the margrave proved a reluctant host, fearing Habsburg vengeance if he was seen to assist an Imperial enemy. He allowed the Palatine family to lodge in the castle at Küstrin. It was almost a ruin, half-roofed and crawling with rats. Here, at Christmas, two ladies-in-waiting helped Elizabeth to deliver her fifth child, a son. He was named Maurice after the Dutch stadtholder, Frederick V’s uncle and a rare friend in an increasingly hostile world. All around him, Frederick’s former supporters turned their back on his cause and begged for Habsburg mercy.

The rebel nobles of Prague capitulated a fortnight after the battle of White Mountain. For several months, it seemed that Emperor Ferdinand would forgo vengeance. However, he had not forgotten the rebellion, nor forgiven the rebels. Twenty-seven ringleaders were suddenly rounded up and a scaffold was erected. The condemned were publicly paraded, before torture and execution. Their remains were hacked up and left to decompose in key positions along the Charles Bridge. They stayed on view for several years, reminders of the reward for insurrection.

On 21 January 1621, the Emperor carried out his terrible threat: Frederick was issued with the Imperial ban, for ‘the rupture of the public peace’. There were objections from the Elector’s allies, criticising this ‘so sudden, extraordinary, and most dangerous proceeding’,[fn18] but Frederick was now an outlaw, who could be harmed by anyone with impunity. Young Frederick Henry chose this moment of imminent danger to report on his brothers and sisters to his grandfather in England: ‘Sir, we are come from Sewnden to see the King and Queen and my little brother Rupert, who is now a little sick. But my brother Charles is now, God be thanked, very well, and my sister Elizabeth, and she is a little bigger and stronger than he.’[fn19]

Frederick’s imperative was to withdraw himself and his family to a place where they would no longer be vulnerable to Habsburg vengeance. The United Provinces felt a moral duty to grant sanctuary to a man who they had encouraged to fight a common enemy, but who had failed. Frederick also had a significant blood link with the Dutch — his mother was the daughter of William the Silent. The republic took in its defeated ally, who was a grandson of their most revered warrior prince.

While baby Maurice, freshly weaned, was sent to live with his aunt in Brandenburg, and Charles Louis and young Elizabeth remained with their grandmother in Krossen, Rupert and Frederick Henry accompanied their parents to The Hague. Here they were housed and given a monthly pension of 10,000 guilders. Their residence was the Hof to Wassenaer, a large town house. Frederick immediately started plotting how best to reclaim his lands. In the summer, the Dutch lent him 150,000 guilders to raise an army.

*

Looking back, the risk of accepting the Bohemian crown had seemed reasonable. Frederick’s formidable pedigree seemed to be matched by an extensive network of support: ‘The great alliances which he had contracted, his high parentage; his mighty supportments, both within Germany, and without it; the considerable eminency of his House, his Estate, and the body of confederates, principally depending upon his directions; together with the hopefulness, that other Princes and Peoples had of him: these were the fair eminencies that differed him from other Princes; and these were the procurers of his election to the Crown of Bohemia.’[fn20] However, failure made Frederick a figure of ridicule across Europe.

Opponents of the couple gloated at their pitifully short rule, referring to them as the ‘Winter King and Queen’. Such critics viewed their fall as the inevitable result of unreasonable ambition. There was a seventeenth-century proverb: ‘They which take upon them more than of right belongeth, commiteth a great error, and seldom escape unpunished.’[fn21] Frederick and Elizabeth’s fate seemed to embody this lesson. A 1621 book contains an illustration of Frederick clinging to the wheel of fortune. As it turns, he is spun from his throne into the sea. Friendly Dutch fishermen save him from the waves, hauling him, bedraggled, to safety. The text accompanying the image pulls no punches:

Whoever wishes to understand fortune and misfortune,

Let him observe this play of the Palatine.

Very happy was he in the Empire,

His like was not easy to be found.

He lacked neither people nor lands,

Ruled wisely and with judgement.

A wife of royal lineage,

Who multiplied his high name,

Was bringing happiness with young heirs.

His line would not soon die out.

By rich and poor, by young and old,

He was held in high esteem,

Which then was but just,

For he held the most important Electorate

Of the four lay Electors:

He was a jewel of the Holy Roman Empire.

In sum, he had everything, if only he had been satisfied … [fn22]

Frederick’s doomed opportunism had huge ramifications. It accelerated a conflict that had ready combatants on both sides, and breathed life into the intricate alliances and bitter religious rivalries of Western Europe. During the ensuing Thirty Years’ War, spiritual concerns would be frequently cited. However, the predominant issues confronting the German lands were political and secular.

For Rupert and his siblings, their father’s miscalculation condemned them to a fragile future. Their childhood, instead of taking place in the glorious palace at Heidelberg, would be spent in exile.

Chapter Two
Childhood

‘The news is, that the Prince Palsgrave, with his lady and children, are come to The Hague in Holland, having made a long progress, or rather a pilgrimage, about Germany from Prague.’

Letter of James Howell, a gossip, 1620

Rupert’s childhood was set against his family’s constant expectation of restoration. The prince’s youngest sister Sophie remembered her siblings’ favourite game: a fantasy return journey to Heidelberg. The children would sit on chairs, pretending they were coaches, and then undertake the make-believe ride ‘home’. There were stops, to rest the horses and refresh the travellers, before the longed for destination was reached. Whether this dream homecoming could ever become reality depended on their father and his ability to knit together an alliance strong enough to defeat a many-headed enemy.

By mid 1622, Frederick had lost not just his Bohemian kingdom, but also all his Palatine lands. Their reclamation remained his focus for the rest of his life. The Spaniards proposed that the Palsgrave’s heir, Frederick Henry, be raised at Emperor Ferdinand’s court, in Austria. He would then marry a Habsburg princess and, on coming of age, would be restored to his father’s electorate. The compromise was clearly unacceptable: Frederick Henry would have to become Roman Catholic if he wanted a peaceful return of his ancestral lands. By rejecting this formula, Frederick elected to fight for his crowns, not bargain for them.

Though grateful for the sanctuary offered by the United Provinces, Frederick was keen to minimise his period as a Dutch pensioner: ‘May it please God,’ he wrote to Elizabeth, ‘to give us a little corner of the world, to live there happily together, it is all the good fortune that I desire. But staying at The Hague hardly appeals to me.’[fn1] Despite his humiliating displacement, Frederick’s marriage continued to be happy and bear fruit, the nursery receiving a new royal recruit on an almost annual basis: Louisa Hollandina was born in 1622 and was made a godchild of the States-General (which resulted in a useful, additional pension, of £200 per year); Louis, the seventh child, appeared in 1623; Edward followed, in 1625; Henrietta, in 1626; Philip, in 1627; Charlotte, in 1629; Sophie, in 1630; and Gustavus, in 1632. There were thirteen children in all: Rupert had seven brothers and five sisters.

Given the continuing expansion of their brood, Frederick and Elizabeth were thankful when, in 1623, the Prince of Orange offered the loan of one of his larger houses. The Prinsenhof had once been a convent dedicated to the memory of St Barbara. It was situated in Leyden, a town known for its learning and for its textile industry, and fronted onto a canal. A bridge over this waterway led to the town’s famed university, which produced large numbers of Protestant priests, and which the Palatine princes attended. The Prinsenhof, long since demolished, was Rupert’s family’s principal home from when he was aged 3 until he turned 21.

Frederick also established a hunting lodge for the family at Rhenen. This was halfway between Arnhem and Utrecht, on the Lek, a tributary of the lower Rhine. The building had previously been a monastery and was a gift from the province of Utrecht, which also provided some of the house’s furniture. It had none of the grandeur of the castle at Heidelberg, but Frederick oversaw renovations, determined to provide a retreat fit for his queen. The diarist John Evelyn visited Elizabeth there in the summer of 1641. He recalled Rhenen being ‘a neat palace or country house, built after the Italian manner’.[fn2]

Queen Elizabeth retired to Rhenen for much of each summer: she loved the place for its tranquillity, beauty, and, above all, its lack of ceremony, which led to a welcome reduction in household expenditure. The exiles were living from hand to mouth, selling valuables to fund their lives. It was a family joke that they frequently dined on pearls and diamonds, since pawned jewels underwrote the domestic budget. Of the children, Rupert was the one who loved his time at Rhenen the most — from an early age he had a passion for hunting and the outdoors.

*

It was believed that upper-class children should be taught to read as soon as they could talk. Rupert had an early and easy facility with words: ‘Rupert is here blithe and well,’ Frederick Henry wrote to Charles Louis. ‘He is beginning to talk, and his first words were “Praise the Lord” in Bohemian.’[fn3] By the age of 3, Rupert was able to speak some English, Czech, and French. ‘Little Rupert is very clever’, his father wrote to Elizabeth, in 1622, ‘to understand so many languages.’[fn4] While still young, he mastered Dutch, but had no time for Latin and Greek. He insisted that dead languages were no use to him, for he was going to be a soldier.

Elizabeth and Frederick had both been brought up away from their parents. Despite this, Frederick was a warm father: Sophie recalled in middle age her father’s ‘tenderness for children, which was one of his most lovely qualities’.[fn5] However, Elizabeth’s maternal instincts were muted. The children remembered their mother ‘preferring the antics of her monkeys and lap-dogs to those of her babies’.[fn6] Indeed, she even seemed more enamoured of her guinea pigs than she was of her offspring.

The Palatine children were placed in the care of a middle-aged couple, Monsieur and Madame de Plessen. ‘Madame Ples’ had been Frederick’s governess when he was a boy. Frederick wrote instructions, outlining the upbringing he wanted for his heir, Frederick Henry: ‘Be careful to breed him in the love of English and of my people, for that must be his best living; and, above all things, take heed he prove not a Puritan, which is incompatible with Princes who live by order, but they by confusion.’[fn7] Rupert and the other princes and princesses were brought up with similar guidelines in place.

Rupert was an inquisitive child, who particularly enjoyed natural history, collecting objects of interest with his elder sister Elizabeth. He had a scientific mind that found maths and calculations easy, and chemical experiments fun. He was also artistic: he and his sister Louise were extremely able painters and they received tuition from the Court artist Gerard van Honthorst. With so many siblings, there was always someone on hand who shared your tastes.

We do not know the exact routine of Rupert’s schooldays. The boys and the girls were educated separately, but female education was in no way inferior to that of the males. The Netherlands at this time was enjoying a flowering of intellectual life, and one of its stars was Anna Maria van Schurmann, ‘the Dutch Minerva’, who lectured at the universities of Leyden and Utrecht. Both sexes were given a thorough grounding in logic and mathematics; writing and drawing; singing and playing instruments. The school day was full and needed structure. Princess Sophie remembered a demanding schedule, which made the children greet minor illness as a fortunate release from drudgery.

Sophie and her sisters rose at seven each morning. They spent the first part of the morning praying, reading the Bible, and attending tutorials. Dancing lessons, from ten until eleven o’clock, provided a welcome break from religious and academic instruction. At eleven o’clock the princes would return from university for lunch. This took place around a long table and was conducted with all the formality of a functioning court. The children could easily forget that their royal family was in exile: ‘When I entered’, Sophie remembered, ‘my brothers were ranged opposite with their Governor and Gentlemen-in-Waiting behind them. I had to make a deep curtsey to the Princes and a little one to the others; a very deep one on taking my place, and a little one to my Governess who with her daughters made a very deep one to me on entering …’[fn8] There were further curtseys when the royal children handed their gloves to attendants, another on reaching forward to wash their hands in a bowl, and a final flurry of bobbing when taking their place at table.

Sophie’s recollections betray a childhood of stultifying monotony. ‘All was so regulated that one knew on each day of the week what one would eat, like in a Convent.’[fn9] Rigid Calvinism underpinned the timetable: on Sundays and Wednesdays a pair of priests or professors would eat with the children, their conversation always focused on religion. The girls would then have a rest until two o’clock in the afternoon, when another series of lessons would begin. Supper at six was only a brief respite in a day devoted to God. Bible readings and prayers aided the digestion, until the children’s bedtime at half past eight. This was Sophie and her sisters’ daily routine until they were 9 or 10 years old.

The linchpin of the children’s instruction was the need to become ‘Jesuit-proof’.[fn10] Frederick felt this could be more easily achieved through learning the Heidelberg Catechism, the embodiment of the Palatinate’s Calvinist state religion, by heart. Upholding Protestantism against Catholicism had caused the family’s displacement, and Frederick and Elizabeth were determined that the children should remember this and celebrate it as the honourable — if regrettable — consequence of virtuous devotion. Their sacrifice could never be viewed as being in vain, if it remained wrapped in the shroud of martyrdom.

The exiles were repeatedly touched by tragedy. Young Louis died of a fever while teething, prompting Elizabeth to write: ‘He was the prettiest child I had, and the first I ever lost.’[fn11] An even heavier blow fell in January 1629. Frederick Henry, the eldest prince, had become the Elector’s constant companion. Sir Henry Wotton, in his Reliquiae, called the boy ‘a gentleman of very sweet hope’. We can glimpse exuberance and a boyish charm in a letter he wrote to his grandfather, James I, when aged 9:

Sire,

I kiss your hand. I would fain see your Majesty. I can say Nominativo hic, haec, hoc, and all five declensions, and a part of pronomen, and a part of verbum. I have two horses alive that can go up my stairs, a black horse and a chestnut horse.

I pray God to bless your Majesty.

Your Majesty’s

Obedient Grandchild

Frederick Henry [fn12]

Frederick V had hoped to prosper by investing in a Dutch naval expedition. Its return was imminent and it was known to have several captured Spanish galleons in tow. The Palsgrave took 15-year-old Frederick Henry with him to Haarlem-Meere, to see the ships make harbour. However, in order to save time, or perhaps money, Frederick took his son aboard a packed public ferry. It was foggy and, in the confusion of a busy port, their vessel was rammed by a bigger boat and quickly sank. The Elector was thrown clear of the ferry and clung to a rope till pulled from the water. His son was not so fortunate: Frederick could hear him calling, ‘Save me, father! Save me!’ However, in the gloom it proved impossible to locate the boy, and soon his cries stopped. The next morning Frederick Henry was found, his lifeless body tangled in the ferry’s rigging.

Frederick never recovered from the death of his favourite child. He wrote to inform Charles I of the loss, but found it impossible to describe the depth of his agony: ‘It having pleased God to add to my preceding hardships a new affliction, the pain of which cannot be expressed with the pen.’[fn13] Charles reacted with sincere compassion. On a practical note, he transferred the £300 annual pension previously drawn by Frederick’s second son (and his own godson), Charles Louis, to Rupert.

Charles Louis was now the Palatine heir. He was a more serious character than Frederick Henry. He had spent much of his childhood with his sister Elizabeth at their grandmother’s house in Krossen. In 1627, they moved to Leyden. Charles Louis was reserved and prickly, and found it difficult to adjust to life with his fun-loving, energetic siblings. They called their earnest brother ‘Timon’, after the people-hating central figure of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. It was a nickname Rupert used against his elder brother all his life.

Rupert was developing a strongly individual personality. In contrast to Timon’s cold reserve, Rupert was fiery, mischievous, and passionate. His family called him ‘Robert le Diable’ — Rupert the Devil — and marvelled at his bravery and perseverance. A tale from Rupert’s youth gives a snapshot of his energetic and uncompromising nature.

The Prince took part in a hunting party hosted by his mother. During the chase, the fox tried to escape the hounds by slipping down a hole. Rupert was in time to see one of his favourite dogs disappear after the fox, until it, too, was out of sight. The prince, worried when the hound failed to reappear, started to wriggle into the earth as well. A man called Billingsby, watching first fox, then hound, then prince, go underground, entered the hole himself, took hold of Rupert’s heels, and pulled him out. The prince reappeared, still holding firmly onto the dogs’ back legs. The hound shared its master’s determination: in its jaws was the fox.

*

Although Elizabeth was happy to live away from her children during their nursery phase, she moved them from Leyden when they became adolescents. She kept her daughters by her side, at The Hague. The three elder girls, Elizabeth, Louisa Hollandina, and Henrietta, were physically very attractive, and were noted adornments at the Winter Queen’s court. Sophie, who arrived in 1641, was less good-looking, yet she had a wonderful brain and a very quick wit, and became extremely popular. The boys, however, were not needed at court. Elizabeth wanted them to train for their life’s purpose, the retrieval of their father’s lost lands.

The Elector was dependent on the continued support of others. The United Provinces provided his home and a basic pension, but outside Protestant aid was needed, if the Palatine and Bohemia were ever to be regained. In 1625, Denmark, England, France, Sweden, Transylvania, and various German territories expressed their joint intention of assisting Frederick in his quest.

England’s involvement seemed to promise much: James I had died in 1625 and had been succeeded by Elizabeth’s brother, Charles. On his deathbed James regretted his stubborn refusal to help the Palatine cause and urged his heir to right the wrong. Charles I was sympathetic to Frederick’s plight and the Elector played on his compassion: he sent Charles a portrait by Poelenberg of his seven elder children (Henrietta and Philip were considered too young for inclusion), with hunting trophies at their feet, in a classical landscape. The grand canvas was accompanied by a humble message: ‘The great portrait in which your Majesty will see all your little servants and maidens whom you bring up.’[fn14] Frederick was determined that his brother-in-law should honour family obligations, in a way that his late father-in-law had repeatedly failed to do. Charles demonstrated his loyal intentions by declaring war on Spain in support of Frederick. When, in 1625, Charles sent the Duke of Buckingham to attack Cadiz, the royal favourite flew the Palatine flag as his battle standard. It brought him no luck: the attack was a disaster.

For the next four years, England remained at war with Spain. In 1627 Charles declared that: ‘He had no other original quarrel with Spain but the cause of his dear sister, which he could no more distinguish from his own than nature had done their bloods, so would he never lend ear to any terms of composition, without her knowledge, consent and council.’[fn15] These were noble sentiments, sincerely meant. However, in 1629, Charles decided to dispense with Parliament for the foreseeable future, and soon found that the raft of questionable fundraising measures he relied on was incapable of supporting a costly foreign policy. The king made immediate peace with France, but found it harder to agree terms with Spain: the issue of the Palatinate could not be resolved to both sides’ satisfaction. In the end it was simply left out of the peace treaty. From 1630, Frederick was once more left without English military aid.

Yet it was at this point that Frederick enjoyed his greatest hope of restoration. In the autumn of 1629, Sweden and Poland signed a six-year truce. This left the Swedish king, Gustavus Adolphus, free to enter the Thirty Years’ War. The following year he landed in Germany with 10,000 men and in September 1631 he trounced the Imperial army at the battle of Breitenfeld. Frederick believed this was the first steppingstone to ultimate victory. He was flattered by the compliments paid to him by the Swedish military genius. Gustavus Adolphus, meanwhile, appreciated that Germany could only find peace if the Palatine was returned to its electoral family.

Frederick spent much of his time away from home, on campaign, his sense of princely duty overriding his longing to be with his wife and children. In January 1632 he set off on what he anticipated would be the pivotal campaign — the one that would see him restored at last. Before he left, he wrote to Charles I asking him to look after his wife and children while he was gone. The fighting went well: in May, Frederick accompanied Gustavus Adolphus into Munich, the capital of enemy Bavaria. The Swedish king insisted that Frederick lodge in the abandoned palace of his great adversary, Maximilian. While there, Frederick found many of his cannon, captured at White Mountain a dozen years earlier. He dared to think that the tide had turned — that he would soon be back with his family, in the castle at Heidelberg.

Such thoughts fuelled Frederick’s terrible homesickness. He and his wife kept up a passionate and constant correspondence, their letters accompanied by gifts, and miniatures of themselves and their children. Frederick wrote to Elizabeth from Munich: ‘I am very pleased that Rupert is in your good books, and that Charles is doing so well … God make me so happy as to be able to see you again soon!’[fn16] In fact, the Palsgrave would never be reunited with his wife and children again.

With ultimate victory in sight, the relationship with Gustavus Adolphus had begun to sour. The Swede insisted that, in return for his restoration, the Palsgrave must guarantee equal rights to his Lutheran and Calvinist subjects. Frederick took offence at this perceived meddling in his sovereignty. He decided to return to his family, rather than resolve the disagreement. Riding from Munich to Mentz, he was struck down by a serious fever, which left him delirious and short of breath. When it seemed that he was over the worst of it, news arrived of the battle of Latzen: his Swedish allies had narrowly won the day, but Gustavus Adolphus had perished in the thick of the fighting.

Frederick was consumed by depression: his hopes had rested on the continuing military success of the warrior king. Gustavus Adophus’s death made everything desperate, once more. A few days later, to his doctor’s surprise, Frederick died, meekly surrendering a life that had promised so much, but whose defining moment had been the risky acceptance of the Bohemian crown. Frederick was buried in a grave so anonymous that soon its whereabouts were forgotten.

The following month, on Christmas Eve, Elizabeth wrote to her brother Charles I that she was ‘the most wretched creature that ever lived in this world, and this shall I ever be, having lost the best friend that I ever had, in whom was all my delight’.[fn17] She had genuinely adored her husband and wore mourning for the rest of her life. A decade later guests commented on how her receiving chamber was still hung with black velvet. Elizabeth remembered all the significant moments she had shared with Frederick and marked the anniversaries of his death by fasting.

The Winter Queen remained as loyal to her husband’s aims as to his memory. ‘The subjects of this good Prince’, wrote two Englishmen who fought in Gustavus Adolphus’s army, ‘may have plentiful matter of consolation, from that most heroical, and masculine spirited princess, his Queen; and from that sweet and numerous issue, which he bath left behind him: which promises them an entire affranchisement, one day again; and the resettling of a family so many ways considerable, as is one of the first and ancientliest descended, of all Europe. An issue so fair; and for their numbers, such a blessing: as were not only prepared by God, for a present comfort to their widowed mother: but (which their own excellent towardliness, gives pregnant hopes of), for the raising of their own fair family again; and engrafting the Palatine branches, into most of the great Houses of the Empire.’[fn18] The widow focused her energy on helping Charles Louis reclaim his father’s lost crown.

Elizabeth received an invitation from her brother Charles to return to England, where he could look after her and her fatherless children. She declined, claiming that she would rather travel home when not in mourning. Elizabeth also pointedly mentioned the military support that the United Provinces were offering Charles Louis for the 1633 campaigning season. She asked, though, that Charles offer his protection to her many children. Apart from God, she said, Charles was their ‘sole resource’.[fn19]

Chapter Three
Boy Soldier

‘The Low-countreys are (without all controversie) worthily stiled the Academie of warre, where the art militarie (if any where) truly flourisheth …’

Militarie Instructions for the Cavallrie, 1632

Tales of brave forefathers heightened Rupert’s early appetite for warfare. His most impressive fighting ancestor was Frederick the Victorious, Count Palatine from 1425 until 1476. An inspirational leader, Frederick was celebrated for his personal bravery and his penchant for the full cavalry charge. In July 1460, at the battle of Pfeddersheim, Frederick led his 2,000 horsemen in an assault against the combined forces of the Archbishop of Mainz, the Count of Leiningen, and Ludwig the Black. Frederick’s battle cry was: ‘Today Prince Elector, or no more!’ This do or die attitude brought total success: Frederick’s enemies were shattered by the Palatine horse and fled the field. The tactics remained the same through the Palsgrave’s subsequent years of triumph.

As Rupert contemplated a life in arms, the romance of ancestral glory was tempered by the shocking reality of the Thirty Years’ War. The conflict cost tens of thousands of civilian lives and was felt with particular brutality in the Palatinate: located at the crossroads of destruction, its population of 600,000 would be reduced by two-thirds by the conclusion of hostilities. Emperor Ferdinand II used his position as the shield-bearer of Roman Catholicism to annihilate his opponents. Rupert grew up hearing first-hand reports of outrageous Papist cruelty.

When the Catholic League under Tilly captured Magdeburg, in 1631, its excesses were broadcast round Europe. ‘The church of St John was full of womenfolk’, wrote an eyewitness, Salvius, to the Riksrad of Hamburg, ‘whom they locked in from the outside, thereafter throwing burning torches through the windows. The Croats and Walloons behaved mercilessly, throwing children into the fire and tying the more beautiful and well-off women citizens to their stirrups, made off with them behind their horses out of town. They spiked small children onto their lances, waved them around and cast them into the flames. Turks, Tartars and heathens could not have been more cruel.’[fn1]

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.

Finding himself alone among his fallen men, Rupert rode to help one of Craven’s ensigns, who was defending Charles Louis’s standard with the last of his troopers. Soon all these men were also slain. Rupert was cornered, the sole Palatine survivor in this pocket of the battlefield. He killed the soldier who was holding his brother’s captured colours, then, in a desperate escape attempt, dug his spurs into his horse’s flanks while pointing him at a wall. However, after the day’s exertions, the height was too great for his mount and instead of jumping, it slowly sank to the ground, utterly exhausted. On foot now, Rupert killed the first enemy soldier who approached him. He refused to surrender, but his position was quite hopeless. He was quickly overpowered. Lippe, a veteran enemy colonel, pulled up the prince’s visor, and demanded to know his prisoner’s identity. ‘A colonel!’ replied Rupert. ‘Sacre met!’ replied Lippe, ‘You’re a young ‘un.’[fn3]

Rupert was recognised by Count Hartzfeldt, the Imperialist cavalry general, and was handed over to Colonel Devereux’s care. The prince began furtive negotiations with the Irishman, giving him five gold coins, while promising more if he would allow him to escape. Devereux would probably have obliged, but Rupert was too valuable a prisoner to be left without a special guard, and Hartzfeldt returned with one before the bribe could take effect. The prince was sent for safekeeping at Warendorf.

What of Rupert’s comrades? Conigsmark never committed his soldiers and fled from the battlefield without a scratch. Charles Louis took flight with him, nearly drowning in the chaos of retreat when his carriage overturned in the fast-running River Weser. He hauled himself out by a willow branch, while his coachmen and horses were swept to their death. King was suspected of treachery: it was later learnt that he had sent his baggage train, containing his silver and personal chattels, to safety, the night before the battle. Unless blessed with extraordinary foresight, he must have known of the enemy’s plans. Captain Pyne, an eyewitness, was of the opinion ‘that the wilfulness of the Elector and the treachery of King … lost the day’.[fn4] The loyal Craven, by contrast, shared Rupert’s fate, and was taken prisoner. He had been seriously wounded in the thigh and the hand, but would live. Craven was subsequently able to buy his freedom with the huge ransom of £20,000. When he offered to pay more to be allowed to stay with Rupert, he was refused.

Among the other prisoners was Sir Richard Crane, who Rupert was allowed to send to England with an account of the defeat. The scribbled message on a page torn from a notebook was the first confirmation that the prince’s family had of his survival: early reports had counted him among the dead. Elizabeth of Bohemia reacted to the news of his capture with immense self-pity, declaring that it might have been better if Rupert had perished. As a prisoner, he would be vulnerable to Catholic conversion — a thought not worth contemplating. She had greeted the suggestion with horror, claiming: ‘I would rather strangle my children with my own hands.’[fn5]

Rupert was defiant in the face of his enemies, the London Post recording: ‘The Emperor that then was pitying his youth, and hearing that he had the face and physiognomy of a Soldier, did send unto him to change his Religion, assuring him, that he would restore him to the Electoral Dignity, and make him Generalissimo of his Army. Prince Rupert returned this answer to the Emperor: That he thanked him for his promised favours, but for matters of Religion, they were out of his element. If the Emperor had sent him a bale of dice (he said) he knew what answer to return him. This wild answer of his being brought unto the Emperor, the Emperor replied, that he might have the face of a soldier, but it appeared by his answer, he but had the condition of a fool, & in choler protested, that he would he troubled no longer with him.’[fn6]

Rupert was moved to the forbidding castle of Linz, overlooking the Danube. So important a captive was he, that 1,200 men accompanied him there. By contrast, as a prisoner he was allowed a skeleton retinue, comprising just a pageboy and two other servants. Ferdinand III, now Emperor in place of the dour bigot whose armies had triumphed at White Mountain, chose the prince’s gaoler with care: Count von Kuffstein was a respected military veteran and an enthusiastic convert to Catholicism. The Emperor hoped Kuffstein would be able to win Rupert’s respect and confidence, before laying siege to his soul. Kuffstein enjoyed discussing military theory with Rupert and soon grew to like his prisoner. He never forgot his mission, though, and soon suggested that the prince might enjoy the company of two Jesuit priests. Rupert flatly rejected the offer, unless he was also allowed the companionship of Protestant guests of his own choice. This was out of the question. The war of spiritual attrition continued.

Rupert busied himself with science and art. He worked on a variation of an instrument originally devised by Darer, which helped in the drawing of perspective. The prince also drew: one of his etchings from this period shows a full-length mendicant friar in a landscape with a city, a river, and a handful of soldiers in the background. This is a precursor of his later, more celebrated, innovations with the mezzotint method of engraving. However, his ability to indulge in his favourite pursuits did not detract from the harshness of his confinement. Rupert would refer to it as ‘a wretched close imprisonment’, and point to his ability to endure it with pride. It was only his unshakeable Protestant faith that stopped him from accepting the Emperor’s ‘stately large promises’,[fn7] which included not just freedom, but also generalship in the Imperial army and the grant of a small principality, which he would be able to call his own.

From time to time the prince joined the count’s household for dinner and he was allowed occasional access to the castle’s gardens. It is not recorded where he first met Kuffstein’s daughter, Susan, but we know the two of them fell in love. Rupert recalled her much later as ‘one of the brightest beauties of her age, no less excelling in the charms of her mind than of her fair body’.[fn8] ‘He never mentioned her without admiration’, remembered a contemporary, ‘and expressing a devotion to serve her with his life.’[fn9] Given the strictness of his confinement, it seems unlikely that this relationship could ever have progressed beyond the platonic.

Rupert was an intriguing figure to his captors. Ferdinand III’s brother, the Archduke Leopold, went to examine the prince during the second year of his imprisonment. Leopold felt that Kuffstein was keeping the prince on too tight a leash, and saw to it that Rupert be allowed to play ‘ballon’ — tennis — and practise military skills, including the use of a gun with a rifled barrel. He became an extremely accomplished tennis player, and a very accurate shot. Provided he gave his word not to escape, Leopold felt that Rupert should be granted greater physical freedom. He was given three-day passes that allowed him to join surrounding noblemen on hunting expeditions. His favourite host was Count Kevenhüller, whose residence was at Kamur, in Bavaria: ‘It was’, Rupert’s manuscript biographer wrote, ‘a most pleasant place, and the count received him with all the honour imaginable.’[fn10]

The prince’s family seldom received news of his well-being, but Elizabeth of Bohemia never wavered in seeking Rupert’s release. When the Earl of Essex visited The Hague, she urged him to go on to Austria and intercede with the Emperor on her son’s behalf. When Essex declined, Charles Louis was disappointed. He felt that only somebody of the earl’s stature could reasonably undertake such a mission, because any lesser figure would be vulnerable to the effects of Rupert’s hot-headedness: ‘Essex should have gone’, Charles Louis wrote, ‘because there was no one else would, neither could I force any to it, since there is no small danger in it, for any obstinacy of my brother Rupert’s, or venture to escape, would put him in danger of hanging.’[fn11]

Charles I sent Sir Thomas Roe, Elizabeth of Bohemia’s devotee, as an ambassador to reiterate English support for Rupert’s release. Favourable reports reached The Hague of Roe’s progress, the Countess of Lowenstein writing: ‘I hope by the solicitation of Sir Thomas Roe we shall have our sweet Prince Rupert here: he hath been long a prisoner.’[fn12]

Ferdinand III eventually agreed to free Rupert, if he apologised for taking up arms against the Empire. The prince refused, saying that he had nothing to apologise for: he had only been doing his duty. This message reached Ferdinand when he was being visited by the Palatinate’s greatest foe, the Duke of Bavaria. Maximilian persuaded his host that such impudence demanded severe punishment. Rupert’s imprisonment now entered its toughest phase: his trips from the castle, his ability to play sports, and his contact with Kuffstein’s daughter were all forbidden. A detachment of twelve musketeers and two halberdiers was ordered to keep the prince under 24-hour watch.

Rupert’s only consolation lay in the company of pet animals. The Earl of Arundel was an eminent, cultured, English aristocrat who had joined the retinue accompanying the newly married Elizabeth to Heidelberg, after her marriage to Rupert’s father. Arundel, permanently disabled after being thrown from his carriage in London, had subsequently been a benign presence in the life of the Palatines since 1632, when he was sent to the United Provinces in a futile attempt to persuade Elizabeth of Bohemia to bring her fatherless family to live in her brother’s kingdom. Subsequently, the earl had greatly enjoyed Rupert and Charles Louis’s company during their visit to England, commissioning Francois Dieussart, a French sculptor, to sculpt busts of the two princes.

Arundel was deeply upset by Rupert’s protracted imprisonment and sent the prince a white dog, which seems to have been a rare strain of poodle. Rupert named him ‘Boy’ and made him his constant companion. The Grand Turk heard of the dog’s beauty and ordered his ambassador to find him a puppy of the same breed. The prince also domesticated a hare, which followed him at heel. Rupert had inherited his mother’s affinity for animals.

Once, the prince was nearly sprung from his cage. A Franco-Swedish force struck towards Linz, with Rupert’s release its main aim. It was met and defeated by Imperialists under Archduke Leopold. Soon after the engagement, Leopold rode to visit the captive once more, and his friendship with Rupert resumed. Meanwhile, Ferdinand’s Empress, who had been born a Spanish princess, began to advocate the prince’s liberty. With domestic problems escalating dangerously in England, Charles I increased his pressure on the Emperor: he needed his nephew to help lead whatever army could be mustered, if hostilities broke out. The concerted efforts eventually persuaded Ferdinand to grant Rupert his freedom, provided he promise never to fight against the Empire again. This was a considerable undertaking from a prince who was keen to avenge his father’s humiliations and whose vocation was the military. However, worn down by years of captivity, and eager to resume life as a free man, Rupert’s stubbornness gave way. He reluctantly agreed to this far-reaching restriction.

A symbolic act was needed, to bring about the prince’s release. When Ferdinand was hunting near Linz, it was arranged that Rupert would pretend to come across the hunting party and pay homage to the Emperor. This would be enough to trigger his freedom. Rupert arrived at the appointed time and place, to find a particularly ferocious wild boar holding hounds and hunters at bay. While everyone else hung back, Rupert rushed forward with a spear and slew the boar. The Emperor proffered a hand to the brave prince and Rupert kissed it. From that moment, he was free.

Ferdinand made a final offer to the prince of a senior command against the French and Swedes, and promised that he would be allowed to continue in the Protestant religion while serving. Rupert declined: he had compromised enough.

The prince was keen to surprise his family by reaching home before official messengers could bring them news of his release. He arrived back at the Prinsenhof in December 1641, just ahead of Sir Thomas Roe’s letter announcing his freedom, and remained with his delighted mother for two months.

Rupert returned to find Elizabeth recovering from the loss of another child. Gustavus had died in agony on 9 January 1641, five days before his ninth birthday. Rupert’s youngest brother had been in acute pain for much of his short life, but none of the many doctors the family had called on had been able to establish the cause of, or think of a cure for, his affliction. Gustavus’s final days were so terrible that they left a lifelong impression on Sophie, Rupert’s youngest sister. She later recalled that, ‘on opening him stones were found in his bladder, one of which was the size of a pigeon’s egg surrounded by four others that were pointed, and one in his kidneys in the shape of a large tooth that has been pulled out with its root.’[fn13] Only then did family members understand the full ghastliness of the ordeal that the little boy had endured for so long.

Rupert’s return provided a fillip for the grieving, impoverished family-in-exile, most of whose financial reserves had been spent on the ill-fated expedition that had resulted in the prince’s incarceration. That winter Rupert busied himself joining in scientific experiments with his sister Elizabeth. Active service soon reclaimed him, however. The uncle who had helped secure his freedom demanded Rupert’s presence across the North Sea, for Charles’s kingdom was facing the imminent prospect of civil war.

Chapter Five
To His Uncle’s Aid

‘Though I will never fight in any unrighteous quarrel, yet to defend the King, Religion and Laws of a Kingdom against subjects, who are up in arms against their Lord and Sovereign … such a cause my conscience tells me is full of piety and justice: and if it please God to end my days in it, I shall think my last breath spent with as much honour and religion, as if I were taken of my knees at my prayers.’

Prince Rupert His Declaration, 1642

From 1629 until 1640 England experienced what royal opponents termed ‘the Eleven Years’ Tyranny’, when Charles ruled without Parliament. The king managed to obtain funds through various controversial means, including the sale of commercial monopolies, the appropriation of tonnage and poundage customs dues, and by raising the naval war tax of Ship Money during peacetime. These methods helped to foment dissent, at a time when there was no national forum where it could be expressed. The king’s personal rule polarised the political nation.

The tensions that led to civil war became discernible, with increasing vividness and frequency, from the late 1630s onwards. The problems were not new, as an intractable king and an ambitious Parliament clashed with escalating force. Two of James I’s later Parliaments had been short-lived, as traditional monarchy failed to react with tact or understanding to strong social, economic, religious, and philosophical shifts.

Members of Parliament demanded a greater say in government, and a furthering of the Protestant cause at home and in Europe. Charles, though, was unresponsive. He had inherited his father’s belief in the divine right of kings, which held the monarch to be God’s anointed, with a right to rule as he saw fit. He expected his people’s representatives to respect his sovereignty, while granting him revenue when required. Four years into his reign, with three sessions already failed, Charles forewent the demanding politicians dominating Westminster and looked to fund his policies through the resurrection of ancient Crown privileges.

The religious sensibilities of seventeenth-century Europe compounded the discord. The atrocities of the Thirty Years’ War demonstrated that the clash of different Christian sects could lead to carnage. Tales of Catholic brutalities in Germany found a ready audience in Protestant England: ‘At the taking of Magdeburg,’ it was reported in a pamphlet of 1641, ‘a Preacher of great esteem was dragged out of the Church to his own house, that he might see his wife and children ravished, his tender infants snatched from the mother’s breast, and stuck upon the top of a lance, and when his eyes and heart were glutted with so cruel a spectacle, they brought him forth bound into the street, and laid him in the midst of his own books, and setting fire thereto miserably burnt him, and thus have I given you a taste of the lamentations of Germany.’[fn1] The message was clear: the Papists would do the same to their religious foes in England, if they ever got the opportunity — a fear made more real by the threat of rebellion across the Irish Sea. Charles’s marriage to Henrietta Maria, Henry IV of France’s daughter, left him open to the Puritan fear that the queen’s Catholicism would taint the monarch’s soul. When the king failed to launch an armed crusade to restore Rupert’s parents to the Palatine, critics claimed this showed a shameful lack of commitment to Protestantism abroad.

The king’s promotion of the High Churchman William Laud to the Archbishopric of Canterbury was deeply unpopular. Laud’s enemies claimed that: ‘The Archbishop hath been a notable deceiver; for whilst he did always pretend to cast out Popery and faction, he endeavoured nothing more than to bring it in, and settle it among us.’[fn2] Charles’s patronage of such a man seemed to confirm Puritan fears that the corrupt and ungodly, wilfully ignorant of the spiritual needs of the people, were favoured above true believers. This trend left the flock exposed to the wiles of Catholic predators, a theme John Milton angrily explored in his 1637 poem, ‘Lycidas’:

Blind mouthes! that scarce themselves know how to hold

A Sheep-hook, or have learn’d ought els the least

That to the faithfull Herdmans art belongs! …

The hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed,

But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,

Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread:

Besides what the grim Woolf with privy paw

Daily devours apace, and nothing sed,

But that two-handed engine at the door,

Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.

The Puritans believed the king to be dangerously out of kilter with the religious preferences of most of his subjects. This was, they believed, an abrogation of his duty to God. By logical extension, if Charles could not observe his obligations to the Lord, why should they offer unquestioning obedience to their monarch?

*

Charles was king not just of England, but also of Scotland and Ireland. It was his Scottish subjects that brought an end to his personal rule.

Presbyterianism was a radical form of Protestantism that flourished in Scotland, particularly in the Lowlands. In 1637, ignoring his advisers north of the border, Charles insisted on imposing Laud’s English Prayer Book on the Scots. This attempt to achieve spiritual conformity in the two countries caused political as well as religious opposition. When Jenny Geddes, an Edinburgh servant girl, hurled her stool at a priest spouting Laudian offensiveness in St Giles’s Cathedral, her aggression was symbolic of a people’s fury. The Scots resented the highhandedness of a distant ruler who dared to meddle with their souls.

Two Anglo-Scottish conflicts, the Bishops’ Wars, followed. The first, in 1639, was an inconclusive affair that did little more than reveal the feebleness of Charles’s army. The second, a year later, ended in outright humiliation for the king: the Scots defeated the English in battle, and took orderly occupation of Durham and Northumberland. Charles, unable to finance a counterforce, was obliged to summon his first Parliament for more than a decade. Despite the national emergency of having a foreign force on English soil, the Members declined to grant funds unless the king first dealt with wider issues: ‘No taxation without redress of grievances’ was their uncompromising mantra. Their three prime grievances involved the liberty of Parliament, as well as questions of religion and civil government. Charles was not prepared to bargain on any point: ‘the Short Parliament’, so long in the gestation, perished after just three weeks.

The continuing Scottish crisis meant that Parliament had to be reconvened. November 1640 saw the start of what would come to be known as ‘the Long Parliament’. During its first six months it used the foreign incursion to win concessions from the beleaguered king. Charles was forced to approve the Triennial Act, which obliged the Crown to summon Parliament at least once every three years. Members also dismantled the raft of revenue-raising methods that Charles had relied on during his personal rule.

Those favourites most closely associated with the Eleven Years’ Tyranny were now exposed to vengeful fury. Archbishop Laud was imprisoned in the Tower of London. The equally controversial Earl of Strafford, who had ruled Ireland for Charles, suffered a humiliating impeachment. Extreme opponents then insisted on his execution. In a moment of weakness for which he never forgave himself, Charles signed the death warrant of his most loyal servant. Strafford’s dignified acceptance of his fate added to the king’s acute sense of guilt.

Constitutional surgery, combined with the removal of hated advisers, satisfied many in Parliament. However, the radicals, led by the Tavistock MP John Pym, wanted to push further. They sought the abolition of bishops, approval of the appointment of royal ministers, and control of the military. Charles’s supporters were shocked by this broad attack on the royal prerogative, and presented the radicals as self-serving and greedy:

… The game they play for is so great,

Vain is all hope them to intreat.

The Crown is strong: the Church is rich,

At these two things their fingers itch.[fn3]

But the Crown was not strong, and its weakness became ever more obvious. When Irish Catholics rebelled in October 1641, murdering thousands of Protestants, the king prepared to summon, and appoint, the commanders of the avenging English army. However, Parliament insisted on being party to such important matters of state. Meanwhile, critics of the court composed the Grand Remonstrance, an itemised list of the king’s alleged misdemeanours. This was narrowly approved by Parliament. Pym and his acolytes were placing the king — a weak man prone to impulsiveness and stubbornness — under intense pressure. Eventually the strain told.

On 4 January 1642, Charles attempted to arrest six especially vocal Parliamentary critics. Five were Members of the Commons, while one sat in the Lords. However, all had fled before the arrival of the king and his party, which included Rupert’s brother, Charles Louis. This clumsy lunge at the court’s enemies was the brainchild of George, Lord Digby. Digby, heir to the earldom of Bristol, would become Rupert’s greatest enemy in the Royalist camp. He had previously been a critic of the king’s advisers, while always stressing his loyalty to the Crown. Digby had argued that the monarch could only function correctly with the cooperation of Parliament: ‘The King out of Parliament hath a limited, a circumscribed Jurisdiction’, he had told the Commons, ‘But waited on by his Parliament, no Monarch of the East is so absolute in dispelling Grievances.’[fn4]

Digby had argued eloquently for Strafford’s impeachment, but had been appalled when radical colleagues insisted on — and gained — the earl’s head. The execution caused Digby to side with the king. His charm and eloquence had quickly earned Charles’s forgiveness. The same gifts went on to win the king’s highest favour. However, the armed intrusion was early evidence of Digby’s poor judgement. The move backfired spectacularly, infuriating much of London and prompting the king to quit his capital. ‘The Five Members’ of the Commons sailed down the Thames in triumph, cheered by supporters celebrating their escape from a king whose key advisers were believed to have lured him into despotism. The failure of Digby’s ill-considered plan greatly increased the likelihood of war.

Charles went first to Hampton Court, then to Windsor. To raise funds, he sold Windsor Castle’s silver plate. In February, afraid that fighting was about to erupt, Charles took Henrietta Maria and the young princesses to Dover. Here the royal party met Prince Rupert, who had come to thank his uncle for his part in securing his release from prison. Although Charles was delighted to see Rupert again, he spent time closeted with the prince, explaining that it would be best if he returned to the Continent: there was still a hope of peace in England, but this would be diminished if the king was seen to have enlisted his warrior nephew. Rupert understood, and accompanied the queen and her daughter Mary to Holland, where the princess was to marry the Prince of Orange. Henrietta Maria took with her some of the Crown Jewels, which she intended to sell. She would invest the proceeds in forces and weapons, to aid her beleaguered husband. Meanwhile, Charles headed for Greenwich for talks with Parliament. The dialogue was bitter and brief.

The king now made for York, keen to put distance between himself and his antagonists, and eager to seize arms that had been stockpiled in Hull since the Bishops’ Wars: after the Tower of London, Hull was ‘the chief magazine in the kingdom for arms and ammunition’.[fn5] However, Sir John Hotham, recently appointed Hull’s garrison commander by Parliament, denied access to his king. Hotham flooded the surrounding fields with water from the Humber and promised to sacrifice his life, rather than surrender the town.

More important men than Hotham now declared against the king. Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, was the 50-year-old son of the dashing Elizabethan courtier who had plunged from favouritism to armed rebellion and paid for his treachery with his life. James I had refused to visit the sins of the father on the son, and allowed Robert to revive the title and repossess the estates that his father had forfeited. Ironically, given his later clashes with Princes Rupert and Maurice, as a younger man Essex had fought against the Hasburgs for the restoration of the Palatinate.

Essex had spent much of the 1630s quietly enjoying his wealth and estates. A brief stint commanding a coastal naval squadron was followed by service as a lieutenant general in the First Bishops’ War. The dispiriting campaign had been followed by a disappointing treaty that Charles I had insisted on brokering himself. The king then further alienated Essex, by failing to thank or reward the earl for his efforts. In January 1642, Charles tipped Essex irretrievably into the arms of Parliament. Egged on by the meddlesome Henrietta Maria, and ignoring the advice of his wisest councillors, Charles asked the earl to resign as Lord Chamberlain of the King’s Household. Six months later Essex accepted his appointment as Lord General of the Parliamentary army. The royal couple had handed their enemies a cautious but competent commander.

*

Both sides in the Civil War claimed to be fighting for the king: it was the definition of kingship that separated them. For most Royalists, the thought of armed conflict against God’s anointed was anathema — an aberration that challenged the cornerstone of their hierarchical beliefs. They saw matters as clearly and simply as Sir Francis Bacon, the Solicitor-General: ‘Where a man doth levy war against the King in the Realm, it is Treason. Where a man is adherent to the King’s enemies, giving them aid and comfort, it is Treason.’[fn6] The Prince of Wales’s chaplain echoed this sweeping condemnation of the Crown’s opponents: ‘Rebellion is a sin that strikes at God’s own self, at the face of Majesty: there is no such express image of God in the world as a King is; every Christian is the Image of Christ as a man, every Minister of the Gospel is (or ought to be) the Image of Christ as Mediator, but a King is the Image of Christ as God, and to rebel against a King is to strike at the face of Christ as God; which was more than they that crucified him durst to do.’[fn7]

The Parliamentarians justified their armed opposition by making a delicate but precise distinction between the king as ruler, and the king as a man. It was quite possible, they believed, to support the king while attacking the evil advisers who were leading him astray. In July 1642, court critics in both Houses joined in a powerful declaration: ‘It cannot be unknown to the World, how powerful and active the wicked councillors about his Majesty have been, both before and since this Parliament, in seeking to destroy and extinguish the true Protestant Religion, the liberty, and Laws of the Kingdom …’[fn8] This subtle separation of loyalties was a common defence throughout Europe at this time and had been employed by rebels in England since the Middle Ages, when justifying resistance to absolute rule. Some critics of the king took their strand of logic past breaking point, openly calling the Royalists ‘rebels’. Parliamentarians looked with disdain on those who offered unquestioning loyalty to the Crown: ‘We found’, a Parliamentarian wrote, when looking back on the start of the war, ‘that the common people addicted to the King’s service have come out of blind Wales, and other dark corners of the Land; but the more knowing are apt to contradict and question, and will not easily be brought to the bent.’[fn9]

The political certainty of both factions was fuelled by strong spiritual allegiances. Continental Europe gave compelling lessons in the importance of binding religious prejudices tight to military ambition. Contemporaries recognised the power of the blend: watching the fighting effectiveness of Gustavus Adolphus’s troops, a British Protestant observed: ‘It is not without a mystery, I suppose, that the old Israelites had an Armoury in their Temple: they would show us, that these two cannot well be parted. And truly, methinks, that a Temple in an Army, is none of the weakest parts of fortification.’[fn10] As the king and Parliament prepared for war, each claimed God’s support.

If religion had been the sole consideration, the prince could have chosen to side with the Parliamentarians, as did his elder brother Charles Louis. Rupert’s Calvinism was in tune with their Puritanism and his family had long benefited from parliamentary support for the Palatine restoration. However, his first loyalties were to the uncle he loved and to the basic principles of royal rule. Charles had been the generous patron of Rupert’s family during its protracted exile, reassuring them of his best intentions even when failing to deliver much of substance. Meanwhile, the king helped to fund his impoverished relations — Rupert received an annual royal pension of £300 — and poured love on his sister and her hapless brood, after Frederick V’s death. He wrote to Elizabeth of Bohemia in 1634:

My Only Dear Sister,

… I could not let this honest servant of yours go without these lines, to assure you of the impossibility of the least diminution of my love to you; the which, as I am certain you easily believe, so I desire you to be assured, that all my actions have and shall tend to your service; and that the counsels and resolutions that come from me, is and will prove, more for your good, than those of any body else: and so I rest

Your loving brother,

To serve you,

Charles R.[fn11]

It was now time to repay the family debt and Rupert did not hesitate in accepting Henrietta Maria’s invitation, in August 1642, to cross once more to England, in support of King Charles. The prince made public his feeling of obligation to the king: ‘And what a gracious supporter hath he been in particular to the Queen of Bohemia (my virtuous Royal mother) and to the Prince Elector, my Royal brother, no man can be ignorant of: if therefore in common gratitude I do my utmost in defence of His Majesty, and that Cause whereof he hath hitherto been so great and happy a patron; no ingenuous man but must think it most reasonable.’ Rupert stressed the high regard in which Europe held his uncle, judging him ‘the most faithful and best defender of the Protestant Religion of any Christian Prince in Europe, and is so accounted by all the Princes in Christendom.’

Rupert also countered those who painted him as a foreign mercenary, eager to ply his warrior trade whatever the cost to the native population: ‘I would to God all Englishmen were at union amongst themselves, then with what alacrity would I venture my life to serve this Kingdom against those cruel Popish Rebels in Ireland.’[fn12] This last point was in response to enemy claims that Rupert and his men were secretly fighting for Catholicism.

In the same defence against his tormentors, Rupert revealed his views on the correct relationship between a monarch and his subjects. It was an uncompromising creed: ‘Suppose that he [Charles] had swayed his Sceptre with a strict hand, reining in the bridle of Authority with harsh Taxation and Tyranny (which it is too well known he did ever abhor as infections to his Sacred Person) yet I say were it so, the Subjects are not thereupon to withdraw their Obedience and Duty neither by the Laws of God nor the Laws of Man, for they are however or at leastwise should be still his Subjects …’[fn13] Such sentiments were succinct, traditional, and unburdened by profound analysis.

*

Rupert’s first attempt to reach England failed. He set off across the North Sea on a 42-gun ship, the Lyon, with his brother Maurice. Accompanying them were Rupert’s chief engineer, Bernard de Gomme, a Walloon; and his favourite explosives’ expert, Bartholomew de la Roche, a Frenchman. Parliamentary sources reported: ‘In this ship Lyon, Prince Rupert and Prince Maurice, with divers other commanders, came in her from Holland, but after three days and three nights storm at sea, not having eaten nor drunk in all that time, these two Princes were in a sick and weak condition, and the ships set to sea again for the North of England, leaving them sick in Holland.’[fn14] The Prince of Orange secured another vessel for Rupert and his party. They set off again, leading a lesser vessel — a galiot — containing weaponry for the coming campaign.

Rupert’s passage was difficult. As his party approached Flamborough Head, on the Yorkshire coast, the Parliamentarian ship the London bore down on them. ‘What are you doing?’ the Parliamentarian captain hollered. ‘We are cruising,’ replied Colster, captain of Rupert’s vessel, while the prince stood next to him in a mariner’s cap. ‘What is the galiot?’ persisted the master of the London. ‘It is a Dunkirk prize,’ Colster lied. The suspicious Parliamentarians insisted that the galiot be searched. Rupert ordered Colster to sail on, prompting the London to summon assistance by firing her cannon. When two more enemy ships appeared on the horizon, Rupert told Colster to head directly for shore.

The prince and his men rowed to safety and landed at Tynemouth. That night the galiot set off again and took its much-needed contents to the Royalist haven of Scarborough.

Rupert wasted no time. He rode for Nottingham, which Charles had made his base, through fields rich with summer crops — the harvest of 1642 was to be especially bountiful. However, he was delayed when his horse lost its footing, throwing him to the ground and dislocating his shoulder. When he eventually reached Nottingham, he found that his uncle had departed for Coventry. Rupert set off south to join him. En route, the prince learnt that Coventry had closed its gates to Charles, its rebel garrison firing on his flag. The king, bewildered by this show of aggression, had moved on to Leicester. Rupert changed direction once more, arriving at Leicester Abbey, where he found his uncle with a tiny army. Its cavalrymen, under Henry Wilmot, had performed poorly in a skirmish. They were immediately entrusted to the prince’s command.

The rank of General of Horse was much coveted. Military manuals of the time insisted that such a position be filled by a figure of rare qualities, reflecting the cavalry’s pre-eminence on the battlefield: ‘Cavalry, so called of Cavallo (which in the Italian and Spanish signifieth a horse) is worthily esteemed a most noble and necessary part of the military profession,’[fn15] recorded a military expert, in 1632. The same authority continued: ‘The General of the Horse, as being one of the principal Chiefs of an army, must be a soldier of extraordinary experience and valour; having in charge the nerve of the principal forces, and on whom the good success of many designs and actions dependeth, as being most usually executed by the Cavalry, especially in battles: where the charging of the enemy in good order usually giveth victory; and contrariwise, the disorders of the Cavalry often disturb and disband the whole army.’[fn16]

The question for more seasoned veterans was whether the smooth-faced Rupert had either the experience essential to such a key position or the ability to transform the ragbag cavalry into a disciplined force. The German prince had bravery, they knew. He also possessed great charisma and style, his impressive figure topped with a plumed hat and ending in fine leather cavalry boots, while his back was swathed in the swish of a scarlet cloak. However, the sum total of his military experience was slight: the action at Rheinberg, four sieges, the cavalry charge at Rheine, and the defeat at Vlotho. Since then, he had been a prisoner of war. He had been absent during three years when some of them had been perfecting their skills on continental battlefields. They looked to Rupert to prove his worth in the crucial, senior position allotted him by his uncle.

On 22 August 1642, when Charles raised the royal standard at Nottingham, it was less a declaration of war than an urgent call for supporters to rally to the Crown. The first night that it flew above the town, the royal standard was blown over. In a superstitious age, this was interpreted as an ill omen for the king’s cause. Certainly, if the Royalists were to have a chance, reinforcements were direly needed: Sir Jacob Astley, the king’s general of infantry, and a former military tutor of Rupert’s, warned that without more men, he could not be sure that he could prevent Charles being ‘taken out of his bed, if the rebels should make a brisk attempt to that purpose’.[fn17] Charles’s army numbered about 2,000 men — a quarter of the size of Parliament’s force, based in Northampton. Some of the king’s men had seen service in the Thirty Years’ War, but most of them were amateurs who were present because of a simple belief that it was their duty to support their monarch. Clarendon recalled the disparity between Rupert’s cavalry and Parliament’s, in the late summer of 1642: the prince’s men ‘were not at that time in number above eight hundred, few better arm’d than with swords; while the enemy had, within less than twenty miles of that place, double the number of horse excellently arm’d and appointed’.[fn18] In London there was optimism that the king’s inability to raise a sizeable army would compel him to bow quickly to Parliament.

Rupert set about equipping and reinforcing his men. The training of horses for battle was as important as the schooling of their riders. John Vernon, who served in the Royalist cavalry, wrote of how best to prepare a horse for war:

You must use him to the smell of gunpowder, a sight of fire and armour, hearing of drums and trumpets, and shooting of guns but by degrees. When he is eating of his oats you may fire a little train of gunpowder in the manger, at a little distance from him, and so nearer by degrees. In like manner you may fire a pistol at a little distance from him in the stable, and so nearer by degrees, and so likewise a drum, or trumpet may be used to him in the stable. The groom may sometimes dress him in armour, using him sometimes to eat his oats on the drum head. In the fields when you are on his back, cause a musket[-eer] and yourself to fire on each other at a convenient distance, thereupon riding up unto him with speed, making a sudden stand. Also you may use to ride him up against a complete armour set on a stack on purpose, that he may overthrow it, and so trample it under his feet, so that by these means, the horse finding that he receiveth no harm, may become bold to approach any object.’[fn19]

By the end of September, Rupert had 3,000 cavalry and dragoons (mounted infantry), most of whom had received some training. He had begun to establish that reputation for tireless energy that was to be his trademark: ‘This Prince, like a perpetual motion’, reported an agitated Parliamentarian historian, ‘with those horse that he commanded, was in short time heard of in many places at great distances.’[fn20] With the myth came hostility and fear. Rupert and his younger brother Maurice were quickly made hate figures by their enemies: ‘The two young Princes, Rupert especially, the elder and fiercer of the two, flew with great fury through divers counties, raising men for the King in a rigorous way … whereupon the Parliament declared him and his brother “traitors”.’[fn21]

Rupert relied on continental military practices, and in so doing revealed what the Earl of Clarendon, an ally but no friend, termed ‘full inexperience of the customs and manners of England’.[fn22] On mainland Europe it was normal to force the local population to fund the army in the field, through levies and confiscations: the Thirty Years’ War general, Wallenstein, invented the dictum, later borrowed by Napoleon, that ‘war should support itself’. In early September Rupert wrote an ultimatum to the mayor of Leicester, demanding £2,000 for the king ‘against the rebellious insurrection of the malignant party’. Although signed by ‘Your friend, Rupert’, there was nothing friendly about the PS: ‘If any disaffected persons with you shall refuse themselves, or persuade you to neglect the command, I shall tomorrow appear before your town, in such a posture, with horse, foot, and cannon, as shall make you know it is more safe to obey than to resist his Majesty’s command.’[fn23]

The startled mayor immediately referred this alien threat to the king, prompting an apology from Charles: Rupert’s letter, he assured the people of Leicester, had been ‘written without our privity or consent, so we do hereby absolutely free and discharge you from yielding any obedience to the same, and by our own letters to our said nephew, we have written to him to revoke the same, as being an act very displeasing to us’.[fn24] Charles was appalled by Rupert’s misjudgement. At this delicate stage, before Leicester had even declared which side it would support, bullying extortion had no place.

Rupert’s gaffe played into the hands of Parliamentary propagandists. From the moment the king’s enemies learnt that Rupert was coming to Charles’s aid, they portrayed him in the blackest light. He was condemned for being sinfully ungrateful for the efforts made on his family’s behalf by England’s Protestants. The prince would never be forgiven for siding against those who had so vociferously championed the Palatine cause.

It was not long before the propagandists presented him to a credulous public as the epitome of immoral soldiery. There was a determination that the most eye-catching of the Royalist leaders should be characterised as wild, dangerous, and even devilish. He was portrayed as a deviant, who enjoyed sex with his white poodle, Boy, and with a ‘Malignant She Monkey’. A Parliamentary pamphleteer enjoyed imagining the creature’s sexual repertoire:

this monkey is a kind of movable body that can cringe and complement like a Venetian courtesan, though her face be not so handsome; yet all her gestures and postures are wanton and full of provocation, she being nothing else (as many others are) but a skin full of lust; her eyes are full of lascivious glances, and generally all her actions do administer some temptation or other; so that she cannot choose but work upon Prince Rupert’s affections; and if he were any thing effeminate as it is not to be doubted but he is forward enough in expressions of love as well as valour; for as the Spanish painter wrote in a Church window sunt with a C. which was an abomination, so her name is an emblem of wantonness, sunt written in that manner being often called a Monkey, which is a kind of prophanation, and thus you see what Prince Ruperts Monkey both nominally and figuratively signify, she being in all her posture the picture of a loose wanton, who is often figuratively called a Monkey.[fn25]

It was not particularly subtle stuff.

His men suffered from similar slanders. Parliamentary printing presses began to use the term ‘cavaliers’ to demonise their enemies. It was an expression of contempt that had arisen from the excesses of the Spanish trooper, the caballo, during the Thirty Years’ War. ‘He’s the only man of all memory’, the author of The Character of a Cavalier stated, ‘whose unworthy actions will perpetuate his memory to ensuing generations. His very name will be odious; and when Posterity … shall find his name mentioned in our Annals, they will be inquisitive to know the Nature of the Beast: This Skellum, this Nigro carbone notatus, this Monstrum horrendum.’[fn26]

Parliamentary leaders encouraged people to give money and silver to their cause, rather than remain vulnerable to ‘several sorts of malignant men, who were about the King; some whereof, under the name of Cavaliers, without having respect of the laws of the land, or any fear either of God or man, were ready to commit all manner of outrage and violence; which must needs tend to the dissolution of the Government; the destruction of their Religion, Laws, Liberties, Properties; all which would be exposed to the malice and violence of such desperate persons, as must be employed in so horrid and unnatural an act, as the overpowering [of] a Parliament by force.’[fn27] Violent, destructive, malicious, and overwhelmingly dangerous: Parliament’s image of the cavalier had taken form before Rupert’s arrival in England. However, he was presented as the quintessential example of this cursed phenomenon.

Meanwhile, the Royalists wanted Rupert — ‘our most Gracious Prince’ — to be seen as a positive influence on their admittedly undisciplined force. He was adamant, they argued, that his troopers ‘should behave themselves fairly, not doing any harm, to man, woman, or child, giving them strict Command, that they should commit no Outrage whatsoever against any of His Majesty’s loving Subjects, neither should they take any thing from them by violence’.[fn28] When any of his men’s crimes were reported to him, it was claimed, Rupert dished out swift and decisive justice.

Among Parliamentary pamphleteers, there were occasional flashes of honesty about the shortcomings of some of their own: ‘I answer that it is true indeed that some of the Parliament’s army are as bad as the Cavaliers’, one conceded, ‘and such as are a very shame to the cause they pretend to stand for, & it were to be wished they were all cashiered, although there were but Gideon’s army left behind.’[fn29]

A generation before the outbreak of war, Henry Peacham had written an unflattering description of the typical English gentleman: ‘To be drunk, swear, wench, follow the fashion, and to do just nothing, are the attributes and marks nowadays of a great part of our Gentry.’[fn30] The Cavaliers were credited with all these debauched and dissolute ways. Fear of their capabilities was heightened as hostilities increased.

The recipients of this nickname, however, were keen to cast themselves in a more forgiving light. One writer in early 1643 talked of ‘the Cavaliers, whom now we see with our eyes to be the Flower of the Parliament, Nobility and Gentry of the Kingdom’.[fn31] An imaginary conversation in The Cavaliers’ Catechism broadened the theme:

Question: ‘What is your name?’

Answer: ‘Cavalier.’

Question: ‘Who gave you that name?’

Answer: ‘They who understood not what they did when they gave it; for it was intended to my infamy, but it proves to my dignity, a Cavalier signifying a Gentleman who serves his King on horseback.’

Question: ‘I pray you tell me what Religion you are of, for it is generally reported of you Cavaliers that you are all most infamous livers, atheists, Epicures, swearers, blasphemers, drunkards, murderers, and ravishers, and (at the least) Papists.’

Answer: ‘To these and the like scandalous aspersions, I will only say thus, (in brief, Sir) that as I cannot excuse all of our Party (no more than you can all of yours) so I cannot but in Conscience (according to my ability) be bound to defend & vindicate the major part of us from such malicious, and fraudulent calumniations …’[fn32]

The dark imagery of the rapacious Cavalier was an attempt to counter the reputation Rupert’s horsemen had won in the public mind, in the early months of the conflict.

*

The personal myth of Prince Rupert began to blossom from the outset of the Civil War. It is so varied and rich that separation of fact from embellishment is often difficult. There were many eyewitnesses present, however, when Rupert, while passing through Stafford, stood in the garden of a Captain Richard Sneyd and fired his ‘screw’d horseman’s pistol’ at a weathercock on top of St Mary’s Church. He managed to hit it from a range of 60 yards — an astonishing achievement in an era when the handgun was notorious for its inaccuracy. Charles I dismissed the shot as a fluke, prompting Rupert to fire again. He repeated the feat. A visitor to Staffordshire two generations later could report ‘the two holes through the weathercock tail (as an ample testimony of the thing) remaining there to this day’.[fn33]

Another credible episode was one the prince enjoyed recounting: when seeking food from a widow, Rupert asked her what her opinion was of the infamous royal nephew. ‘A plague choke Prince Rupert,’ she replied. ‘He might have kept himself where he was born; this kingdom has been the worse ever since he landed.’

Less plausible are tales that were nonetheless believed at the time. These yarns endowed Rupert with almost supernatural powers. As part of his wizardry, it was said that he was a cunning master of disguise. One such story told how Rupert met an apple-seller, and bought 10 shillings’ worth of apples from him, before a mischievous thought came to him:

‘Hold thy hand,’ said the Prince; ‘there is a piece for thee: now hold my horse, change habit with me, and stay here while I sell thy apples — only for a merry humour that I have — and at my coming back I’ll give thee a piece more.’ The fellow willingly lent him his coat and hat, and away went the Prince, selling the apples through the [Parliamentary] army, at any rate; viewing their strength, and in what kind they lay; and, returning to the fellow gave him another piece, with this charge: ‘Go to the Army and ask the commanders how they liked the fruit Prince Rupert, in his own person, did but this morning sell them.’[fn34]

The reader would be forgiven for expecting this merry tale to conclude with appearances by Little John and Will Scarlet. It is difficult to accept that even someone of Rupert’s reckless courage would risk himself in such a perilous exploit. He was one of the most distinctive-looking of men, his great height of 6 foot 4 inches making him 9 inches taller than his average contemporary. However, the tale of the prince selling apples to the enemy in their own camp was accepted by many as fact, not just through gullibility, but because such yarns fitted an established pattern of story-telling.

The folklore surrounding Rupert’s more improbable deeds stem from a cult thriving at this time — that of the gentleman outlaw. Robin Hood was the most popular mythological figure in this tradition: the yeoman bandit who first appeared in Piers Plowman in the 1370s had, by the late sixteenth century, been accorded noble status as Robin, Earl of Huntingdon. One of the best-known tales of his derring-do was ‘Robin Hood and the Potter,’ which celebrated Robin’s ability to wrong-foot enemies by concealing his identity with brilliant cunning. Robin ventured into his enemies’ camp, disguised in much the same way as Rupert was said to have been. It is an ancient, English story-telling device: the hero as daring chameleon. Over five hundred years before, Hereward the Wake, a Saxon rebel leader, was said to have played a similar trick on his Norman opponents, dressing as a fisherman to inspect his enemies’ siege works, before returning to torch them later in the day. That Prince Rupert inspired similar tales shows the fear he provoked, but also the respect that was grudgingly given to a prominent foe who was considered formidable, dangerous, and resourceful.

The notion of a man of royal blood resorting to criminal subterfuge would not have surprised Caroline England: half a century earlier, Shakespeare had dramatised the youthful misdemeanours of Prince Hal, the future Henry V, when led astray by Falstaff and his guttersnipe band. John Taylor, the self-styled ‘Water Poet’, celebrated this irresponsible phase in 1630, placing Hal, ‘the Robber Prince’, in the pantheon of famous English lawbreakers:

Once the fifth Henry could rob excellent well,

When he was Prince of Wales, as Stories tell.

Then Friar Tuck, a tall stout thief indeed,

Could better rob and steal, than preach or read. [fn35]

Rupert, like his princely predecessor two and a half centuries beforehand, was seen as a young warrior whose hot blood lured him into terrible transgressions. The young Palatine, though, was a foreigner, whose peccadilloes were harder to forgive. Furthermore, he had no credit to his name to touch that of Agincourt. His reputation could be blackened without fear; the greater his achievements, the more they must be presented as the sinister accomplishments of a high-born but devilish reprobate.

The image of the prince was coloured not just by outlaw romance, but also by the acts of real contemporaries. They joined high birth and personal courage to thrillingly daring, dastardly deeds. One such cad was John Clavell, a gentleman thief whose crimes were well known to Charles I’s England: arrested in 1627, he attempted to justify and atone for his misdeeds with a series of pamphlets and plays detailing his exploits, many of which were greatly embellished. Clavell, from a good family that had fallen on hard times, was sole heir to a rich uncle. His unfortunate decision to become a highwayman — which he termed a ‘knight of the roads’ — saw him die impoverished, soon after the outbreak of the Civil War. His life of criminality showed that slyness and skulduggery were not the monopoly of the poor and the desperate, but could be attributed to those of gentler blood.

It was easy for Parliamentarian propagandists to seek to undermine Rupert’s qualities and talents by tapping into this vein of popular story-telling. They presented the prince’s legendary luck as the outrageous tricks of a highborn scoundrel. One of the many nicknames given to Rupert early in the Civil War was ‘Prince Robber’.

*

The profile of the prince as foremost Royalist champion was reinforced when he openly challenged the Earl of Essex to fight. The prince, recently made a Knight of the Garter — England’s highest chivalric honour — accused Essex of seeking the crown for himself, and invited him to bring his army to combat the Royalists at Dunsmore Heath on 10 October 1642. This, Rupert claimed, would settle the two sides’ differences in a day: it would be ordeal by battle. ‘And’, offered Rupert, ‘if you think it too much labour and expense to draw your forces thither, I shall as willingly, on my own part, expect private satisfaction as willingly at your hands for the same, and that performed by a single duel; which proffer, if you please to accept, you shall not find me backward in performing what I have said or promised. I know my cause to be so just that I need not fear; for what I do is agreeable both to the laws of God and man, in the defence of true religion, a King’s prerogative, an Uncle’s right, a Kingdom’s safety; think it therefore not strange that a foreigner should take foot upon your English shore with intention to draw the sword, when the Law of Arms prompts him on to that Resolution.’[fn36] It was this sort of posturing — sincere, forthright, but overconfident — that allowed Rupert’s enemies to represent him as hopelessly arrogant.

Yet Rupert’s military worth was soon revealed. His ceaseless energy made one Parliamentarian write that the prince ‘slashed through the land as the lightning that strikes from one quarter of the Heaven to the other’.[fn37] One of his tasks was escorting silver from Oxford University to the safety of Royalist Shrewsbury. Resting at Powick Bridge, 3 miles south of Worcester, he and his men were taken by surprise by 1,000 Parliamentarians in the first notable encounter of the war.

Rupert immediately leapt onto his mount, urged his men to follow him, and led the counter-charge. Unnerved, the Parliamentarians, discharging their firearms ‘at too uncertain a distance, did no execution; but the front of Prince Robert’s troops coming on, discharged just at their breasts, and quite cut off the front: Serjeant Major Byron shot a bullet into Douglas’s belly; Prince Robert, his brother [Maurice], and Sir Lewis Dives slew each a man; Colonel Wilmot singled out Colonel Sandys, and gave him his death-wounds’.[fn38]

The rebels withstood another round of fire from Rupert’s men, but the third time they were shot at, at point-blank range, they broke and fled. In the ferocious quarter of an hour of fighting, and in their subsequent flight across a river, dozens of Parliamentarians were slain or drowned, including some of their most promising officers. Their commander, Colonel Sandys, his life ebbing away, repented his disloyalty to the king: Dr Watts, Rupert’s chaplain, received his dying words, which were full of regret. Only a handful of Royalists died at Powick Bridge, though several of the officers who had been at the forefront of the charge were wounded: ‘Prince Maurice hath received two or three scars of honour in his head, but is abroad and merry,’[fn39] Lord Falkland wrote; while Lord Wilmot’s back was slashed by an enemy sword and Sir Lewes Dives was shot in the arm. Rupert, though ‘he ventured as far as any trooper of them all’,[fn40] remained unharmed. He wrote to his uncle: ‘Your Majesty will be pleased to accept this as a beginning of your Officers’ and my Duty; and I doubt not, as (certainly) they behaved themselves very bravely and gallantly, that hereafter Your Majesty shall find the same behaviour against a more considerable number. Of this Your Majesty may be very confident.’[fn41]

‘This victory’, a Parliamentarian later conceded, ‘was of great consequence to the Enemy, because [it was] the omen and first fruits of the war.’[fn42] Clarendon, in his chronicle of the Civil War agreed, recalling that the Parliamentary forces ‘talked aloud of the incredible, and unresistible courage of Prince Rupert, and the King’s Horse’.[fn43]

It remained to be seen how the charismatic young general and his spirited cavalry would fare in the more structured arena of set-piece battle.

Chapter Six
Edgehill

‘Thou wouldest think it strange if I should tell thee there was a time in England when brothers killed brothers, cousins cousins, and friends their friends. Nay, when they conceived it was no offence to commit murder.’

Sir John Oglander, A Royalist’s Notebook

Both sides in the Civil War looked for past experience when raising their armies, but there were few in either army who could claim to be real soldiers: ‘None was thought worthy of that name, but he that could show his Wounds, and talk aloud of his Exploits in the Low Countries,’ recalled a contemporary, ‘Whereas the whole Business of fighting, was afterwards chiefly performed by untravelled Gentlemen, raw Citizens, and Generals that had never seen a Battle.’[fn1]

Parliament found it easy to recruit in London and the southeast, but the intake in rural areas was often raw and easily shocked by the realities of war. The Earl of Bedford reported from Dorset, in the first month of fighting: ‘The men we brought with us were all Trained-bands, so unskilful, from the colonel to the lowest officer, and withal so astonished, when they heard the bullets whistle about their ears … and when the cannon began to play upon them, they run as if the Devil had been in them.’[fn2] Bedford estimated that the combination of being shot at and having to sleep rough in the field for two nights, resulted in the immediate desertion of more than half his men.

The Parliamentarians were short of junior officers and many sergeants suddenly found themselves commissioned. During the first year or more of the Civil War, partly as a result of this lack of leadership, Essex’s troops were cited as pillagers as frequently as the infamous Cavaliers. A Parliamentarian pamphleteer writing from Ludlow in October 1642 was full of indignation about ‘the barbarous and insolent actions of the blood thirsty party’[fn3] — the Cavaliers. Yet, en route to the first major battle, Edgehill, two Royalists who looted minor objects from an absent Parliamentarian’s home were hanged for their crime. Meanwhile, Lord Clarendon noted with resentment, the rebels’ propaganda was so effective that the many excesses of Essex’s force were buried under the torrent of libels cascading from the printing presses.

Discipline was difficult to establish in either force, which largely comprised shilling-a-day agricultural labourers on foot and their supposed social superiors on horse. There were incidents of Essex’s cavalry stealing from his infantry and of his officers being relieved of their possessions by their own men. Sir Thomas More’s observation in Utopia, of 1516, seemed still to hold true in this, the fourth decade of Stuart rule: ‘Robbers do not make spiritless soldiers, nor are soldiers the most cowardly of robbers, so well are the occupations in harmony with each other.’[fn4] Whichever side could bring its unruly forces under control first, and harness its aggression to its political cause, would enjoy a huge advantage.

To fill his ranks at the outbreak of war, the king drew heavily on the limited populations of Wales, Cornwall, and the northwest of England. The summer and early autumn of 1642 saw a scrambling to control areas with less clear-cut allegiances. Parliament quickly dominated East Anglia and Kent, and controlled the key Midland towns of Banbury, Coventry, Northampton, and Warwick. They also gained footholds in districts that had suffered from Royalist excesses. In September 1642, a large body of Nottinghamshire gentry approached the Earl of Essex and itemised ‘the innumerable oppressions that they had suffered by the Cavaliers, who daily pillage men’s houses, drive away their cattle, take away their arms and monies, cut and spoil their goods, taking away all means of living and subsisting, all their endeavours tending to the destruction of Religion, King and Kingdom’.[fn5] They resolved to live and die in Essex’s service.

Most people, however, were unenthusiastic participants in a conflict that they felt sure was bound to bring them no good. The Recorder of Hereford, while declaring his loyalty to the Crown, begged the king to save his people from the impending apocalypse: ‘O my dread Sovereign, let but your Servant put into your mind the dire effects of War, when flourishing Cities shall be turned to dust, nay this yet flourishing Kingdom shall become its own destroyer, buried in the tomb of blood and slaughter, when our young infants shall be rudely torn from the sad mother’s breast whose shrieks and cries serve as sad music to the sacrifice, when our young virgins and our wives shall be subject to bloody cruelty, when death shall triumph’.[fn6]

A neutral pamphleteer, horrified at the ‘great game’ being played by king and Parliament, advised: ‘That his Majesty would understand his Interest to be, to unite, not to divide his Subjects, and to remember with what manner of Trophies the magnanimous Princes of former times have adorned their Funerals and Fame. That he would choose rather to fight in the head of the British Armies, for restitution of his Nephews to their lost inheritance, than employ them here to pillage and destroy his own subjects.’[fn7] Parliament, meanwhile, should accept the king’s concessions with humility and gratitude. But Charles and his opponents were too far down the warpath to heed the concerns of the common people; they carried on recruiting. When volunteers could not be found, men were pressed into service against their will.

The rebels had the edge in weaponry. They had taken quick possession of the armaments amassed for the campaigns in Scotland and Ireland. They also seized the royal arsenals and the ironworks of the Weald of Kent. As a result, Parliament never wanted for artillery throughout the war. The early defection of the navy to the rebels was another huge advantage, making it easy to supply their garrisons by sea and also to blockade the king’s ports.

The Royalists had to work harder. Although they secured the weaponry of some of the county militias, it was the energy of a few key men that transformed the king’s negligible support into a serviceable army. While Rupert’s drive transformed the cavalry, in the regions grandees tried to raise men for the king and to create Royalist enclaves. This effort met with varying degrees of success. In south-central England the Marquess of Hertford, a descendant of Henry VII’s, was frustrated in his efforts on Charles’s behalf. In Yorkshire, though, the Earl of Newcastle successfully formed the Northern Army. He also held Newcastle, a crucial lifeline for aid and arms crossing from the Continent.

It was thanks to the arrival of the first of the earl’s convoys of arms and ammunition that Charles was able to face Essex’s army, when it moved into the Midlands in September, seeking to bring the king to heel. Parliament had instructed its lord general: ‘You shall use your utmost endeavours by battle or otherwise to rescue his Majesty’s person, and the persons of the Prince, and Duke of York out of the hands of those desperate persons who are now about them.’[fn8] Pym and his acolytes wanted the people to believe that the king was a reluctant captive of the Cavaliers and that Parliament was sending an army to rescue him.

In hoping that the king would be unable to raise a battle-strength army, Essex underestimated the strength and resolve of the Royalists. He had left London on 9 September, amid the crowds’ calls of ‘Hosanna!’, cautiously stowing his coffin in his baggage train. News of Powick Bridge had stunned the earl, his own Lifeguard among the broken units. He was further surprised by intelligence that Rupert had sidestepped his force and hurried to unite with the king’s main army at Meriden, between Coventry and Birmingham. With Essex a day’s march behind them, it appeared that the Royalist target was London, a conclusion that Rupert’s own recollections bear out: ‘The King’s purpose was all the while … to bring them to a battle, and clear the way to London.’[fn9] Essex moved quickly southeastwards, hoping to overhaul the Royalists, while sending warnings to the capital to prepare itself for attack.

Reconnaissance during these fast-moving weeks was poor, and soon neither army was sure of the other’s whereabouts. It was a shock to all when, on 22 October, the advance rebel units rode into the Warwickshire hamlet of Wormleighton and stumbled upon some of Rupert’s troopers. The prince learnt from these prisoners that the main body of the enemy was near by and his scouts set out that evening to pinpoint its location. They discovered dozens of campfires twinkling round the village of Kineton and raced back with the news. Rupert ordered an immediate attack, but his senior officers restrained him, insisting that such a decision must be referred to the king.

Charles, after consultation with his other generals, agreed to turn back towards the enemy and offer battle on advantageous ground the next day. Before dawn Rupert received the following message: ‘Nephew, I have given order as you have desired, so that I doubt not but all the foot and cannon will be at Edgehill betimes this morning, where you will also find, your loving uncle and faithful friend, Charles R.’[fn10]

Edgehill, near Kineton, was a 650-foot-high ridge whose defensive qualities promised to negate the king’s disadvantage in numbers and weaponry: he had 12,500 men to Parliament’s 14,500. Essex was so eager to accept the invitation to fight that he decided not to wait for straggling troops and artillery to catch up with his main field army. This left the earl with a slight deficit in cavalry.

*

There was pre-battle dissent among the Royalist high command, much of it sparked by Rupert. The prince insisted that he answer to no man except the king: he wanted to lead his cavalry in independent command. This has long been held up as an example of Rupert’s arrogance and ambition, but this is to ignore context. It was normal for European royalty to have supreme power in the army — the wholesale reforms in Louis XIV’s French armies, a generation later, left intact the premise that Princes of the Blood outranked marshals in the field.

The prince’s preferred tactics were more controversial. There were two principal methods of fighting at this time: one the creation of Prince Maurice of Nassau, the other the legacy of Gustavus Adolphus. Rupert favoured the bolder tactics of the Swede. He believed that a bold strike at the rebels was more likely to succeed than the conservative and attritional methods of the Dutch. Lord Ruthven, a 70-year-old veteran who had fought for Adolphus and was now a Royalist general, was foremost among those who agreed with Rupert.

Charles was militarily ignorant and was easily persuaded by Rupert’s passion. However, the Earl of Lindsey, the king’s lord general and the leading advocate for Dutch tactics, felt humiliated: this was not the first time that uncle had turned to nephew and overruled his senior officer, who (Clarendon recalled) was ‘a person of great honour and courage, and generally beloved; who many years before had good commands in Holland, and Germany, and had been Admiral at Sea in several expeditions’.[fn11] Apart from hurt feelings, though, Lindsey was also properly concerned that the Royalists’ chances would be compromised by this last-minute change in battle-plan. An accomplished old soldier, who had served in the Lowlands alongside his enemy counterpart, Essex (whom he respected as a fighting man), Lindsey resigned a command that had been so publicly undermined. Demoting himself to the rank of colonel, he elected to lead his own regiment of Lincolnshire men into battle, telling friends that he hoped to meet an honourable death.

This falling-out over tactics was not so much the result of a young prince’s petulance, as a clear and early example of the disunity in the upper reaches of the king’s high command — a situation that was to hamstring the Royalist cause throughout the Civil War.

Further ripples came from the highly regarded Viscount Falkland, a supporter of Parliament against the king in the 1630s and an admirer of John Hampden — one of the ‘Five Members’ that Charles had failed to arrest in the Commons, and the most famous opponent of the imposition of Ship Money. Falkland’s mansion at Tew, in Oxfordshire, formed a salon for men of learning in the years before the war. However, Falkland was essentially a cautious man and his radical colleagues’ rush for wholesale constitutional change appalled him. Reluctantly appointed as one of Charles’s secretaries of state, Falkland remained among the moderates on both sides who were sickened by the prospect of compatriots spilling each other’s blood: his constant hope was for a negotiated peace. This aim conflicted with Rupert’s view, that differences with Parliament could now only be settled by clear-cut military victory.

One of the secretary of state’s key duties was the transmission of the king’s will to others. However, when Falkland passed on Charles’s instructions to Rupert, the prince declared that he would not receive orders from anyone but his uncle. Falkland, unruffled by the insult, replied with dignity: ‘That it was his office to signify what the King bid him; which he should always do; and that his Highness, in neglecting it, neglected the King; who did neither the Prince, nor his own Service any good, by complying in the beginning with his rough Nature.’[fn12] Falkland quietly refused to serve in Rupert’s division, choosing instead to ride with the Commissary General of the Horse, Wilmot, on the left wing.

There was further dissatisfaction in the King’s Life Guard. Its 300 men were recruited from those aristocrats and gentry who had no independent command, together with their most senior servants. The rest of the cavalry had taken to mocking the Lifeguard for being a ‘show troop’, a pampered adornment rather than a serious fighting unit. To counter this slur its commander, Lord Bernard Stuart, persuaded Charles to place the Life Guard in the place of greatest honour, the extreme right of the front line of his army. Rupert reluctantly incorporated them in the first of his two lines of cavalry, alongside his regiment and those of his brother Maurice and of their cousin, the Prince of Wales. This forward deployment of the lifeguards — well armed with their long swords, pairs of pistols, and battleaxes — deprived the Royalists of a reserve force, if the battle started to go awry.

In the prelude to battle Charles rode among his units, his armour visible beneath a coat of black velvet, lined with royal ermine. He reminded his men of their noble purpose, while countering the enemies’ verbal barbs:

‘Friends and soldiers! You are called Cavaliers and Royalists in a disgraceful sense … Now show yourselves no Malignants, but declare what courage and fidelity is within you. Fight for the peace of the kingdom and the Protestant religion. The value of Cavaliers hath honoured that name both in France and other countries, and now let it be known in England, as well as horseman or trooper. The name of Cavalier, which our enemies have striven to make odious, signifies no more than a gentleman serving his King on horseback. Show yourselves, therefore, now courageous Cavaliers, and beat back all opprobrious aspersions cast upon you.’[fn13]

In the Parliamentary ranks Puritan ministers rode through the units, leading prayers whose content was little different from those being mouthed at the top of Edgehill. Churchmen on both sides convinced their men that they would be doing the Lord’s work later that day, when the killing began. ‘Such may the persons be,’ one Royalist priest was later to say, ‘and such the cause they maintain, that in doing them harm we shall do good, and sure then in wishing them harm we shall do no ill. Such may the persons be, and such the cause they maintain, that we may lawfully fight against them in the field …’[fn14]

An early afternoon exchange of artillery opened the battle of Edgehill, with Parliament getting the better of the duel. Dragoons from both sides then fought a series of preliminary skirmishes, a contest won by the Royalists. Meanwhile, one of the King’s Life Guard recalled, ‘Prince Rupert passed from one wing to the other, giving positive orders to the Horse to march as close as possible keeping their ranks with sword in hand, to receive the enemy’s shot without firing either carbine or pistol, till we broke in amongst the enemy and then make use of our firearms as need should require.’[fn15] The prince then took his position at the head of the right wing, whose 1,400 troopers he had deployed in two lines. The second was to remain in reserve. Rupert led the front line in an orderly advance that progressed from walk, to rising trot, to full-blooded charge, swords drawn, firearms tucked away, spurs digging into their horses’ flanks. The battle cry was ‘The King and the Cause!’

For the Parliamentarians, the enemy thundering towards them was the same demonic force that had swept to bloody victory at Powick Bridge. Colleagues eager to explain the shame of unexpected defeat had boosted the Cavaliers’ reputation, persuading Essex to place the bulk of his horse in the wing facing Prince Rupert. There had been reports, readily believed, that many of the rebel survivors were seen in Worcester, ‘most woefully cut and mangled, some having their ears cut off, some the flesh of their heads sliced off, some with their very skulls hanging down, and they ready to fall down dead, their pistols and carbines being hewed and hacked away in slices, which it seems they held up for guard of their heads’.[fn16] It was the legend of Powick Bridge, as much as the momentum of the charge, which condemned the Parliamentarian left wing at Edgehill.

As the Royalists hit home, they levelled and fired their pistols and carbines. The rebel cavalry had tried to meet the impetus with their own, half-hearted, counter-charge, but it was no use. They poured back into the infantry behind and then continued their flight, some with such panic that by nightfall they reached St Albans, 40 miles away. Rupert’s men pushed on, annihilating the rebel musketeers on the ground before pursuing the broken enemy horse. Some Cavaliers headed for the baggage train, where the silver plate and personal possessions of senior Parliamentarians were seized. Others took the opportunity to pillage innocent civilians.

Wilmot’s front line of Royalist cavalry on the left wing also rolled over their opponents. The terrain between them and the enemy was not suitable for a sweeping charge, being crisscrossed with ditches and containing pockets of Parliamentary musketeers, but Wilmot and his deputy, Sir Arthur Aston, led their men on. Met by a stuttering volley, they cut their way into Parliament’s ranks before firing into the body of the enemy, with devastating effect. The Parliamentarians joined their colleagues in flight.

These twin successes tempted the second lines of the Royalist cavalry into fatal disobedience. Against Rupert’s clear instructions, they charged forward, their commanders, Sir John Byron and Lord Digby, eager to be in at the kill. This waywardness left the infantry and artillery shorn of mounted protection in the face of superior numbers. One of the prince’s colonels, Sir Charles Lucas — a colleague from the successful storming of Breda, several years earlier — rallied some of his men, intending to bring them immediately back to the battle’s centre. But a wave of fleeing enemy blocked his men’s return, and they plunged back into the headlong pursuit that Lucas had temporarily denied them.

Parliamentary propagandists later asserted that Rupert was at the forefront of his frenzied men, urging them on, the plunderer-in-chief (it was later claimed that Prince Rupert’s conduct introduced the word ‘plunder’ to England: ‘Many towns and villages he plundered’, wrote May, ‘which is to say robbed (for at that time was the word first used in England, being born in Germany when that stately country was so miserably wasted and pillaged by foreign armies), and committed other outrages upon those who stood affected to the Parliament, executing some and hanging servants at their masters’ doors for not discovering of their masters.’ May, History of the Long Parliament, ed. 1854, p. 244). In truth, he took no part in the undisciplined rout. Instead, he rode among his men, imploring them to join him in a return to the battlefield. However, the adrenalin surge among his troopers, many of them fighting their first battle, was irresistible: the enemy’s thrilling disintegration, so complete and so immediate, lured them on.

The social make-up of the Royalist cavalry in part explains their indiscipline: some were aristocrats and many were gentry — men who, in their own sphere, were used to giving, not receiving, orders. Besides, they were convinced that the day was already won. Now they saw their task, and their privilege, as being the mopping-up of a defeated enemy and the claiming of their just reward — plunder. Cavalrymen of all eras knew their role at such a moment in a battle. A manual for horse-borne troops advised 250 years later: ‘To obtain the greatest results from a successful engagement it must be followed by a pursuit, which must be vigorous and unceasing.’[fn17] The unbroken, spirited amateurs of Rupert’s squadrons felt compelled to pursue: it was what they had done on the hunting field since they could ride; it was part of their birthright; it was their entitlement.

A similar fiasco had occurred in 1264, during Henry III’s reign, at the battle of Lewes. The king’s son had led his over-excited cavalry off in a triumphant charge, leaving Henry and his infantry unprotected. When the prince returned, he found his father had been taken prisoner by Simon de Montfort’s rebel barons. Edgehill, like Lewes, was far from won when the cavalry left the field. During the absence of so many attacking units, the Parliamentarians diligently achieved huge advantages of their own. ‘When Prince Rupert return’d from the chase’, Clarendon later recalled, ‘he found a great alteration in the field, and his Majesty himself with few noblemen and a small retinue about him, and the hope of so glorious a day quite vanish’d.’[fn18] Fairfax’s men had gradually regained on foot what Rupert’s Cavaliers had claimed, then forfeited, on horseback.

*

The infantry battle formed its own distinctive part of the engagement, only starting once the main cavalry action had spun from the field under its own hectic energy. Sir Jacob Astley, the king’s Major General of Foot, had preceded the action by uttering his famous, soldier’s prayer: ‘Oh Lord, thou knowest how busy I must be this day; but if I forget thee, do not thou forget me!’[fn19] He had then risen from his knees and shouted, ‘March on boys!’ He led his men against an enemy that enjoyed superior numbers, strong artillery fire, and, crucially, some cavalry support.

Sir William Balfour was a Scots-born soldier who had served Charles as governor of the Tower of London. In this era of fluctuating loyalties, he was now Parliament’s Lieutenant General of Horse. Balfour had rescued some of his troopers from the Royalist rout and now funnelled them through the gaps between Essex’s three large brigades of foot. They bore down on, and broke, the Royalist centre. Lord Falkland, seeing this crisis unfold, tried to persuade Wilmot to regroup his cavalry and assist the infantry. Wilmot, however, dismissed the suggestion, replying: ‘My Lord, we have got the day, and let us live to enjoy the fruit thereof.’[fn20] Balfour’s squadrons rode on unchecked, reaching Charles’s cannon, slashing their harnesses, and eliminating them from the battle. They then rode back, past Royalist musketeers who failed to fire on them, believing them to be their own: the cavalry of both sides looked similar and the orange scarves worn by Essex’s men were difficult to see in the smoke-charged air of battle.

When the Royalist infantry on the left-hand flank appreciated the predicament of their colleagues in the centre, they attempted to come to their rescue. However, Essex, alive to the situation, now deployed a body of his infantry to block them. He then ordered his heavily armed Lifeguard to join Balfour’s men in a three-pronged assault on Astley’s beleaguered line. The strength of the Parliamentarian attack prompted many to flee the field, scrambling up Edgehill’s slope in panic. In the confusion, a disaster of major proportions threatened Charles’s army.

Sir Edmund Verney, knight marshal and hereditary bearer of the royal standard, was a reluctant Royalist. ‘I do not like the quarrel’, he remarked, when war became inevitable, ‘and do heartily wish that the King would yield and consent to what they desire; so that my conscience is only concerned in honour and in gratitude to follow my master.’[fn21] Assuming his duties at Edgehill, he carried the royal standard as both a symbol of the king’s military power, and as a rallying point for the Crown’s cause. He was unarmed, apart from the speared point of the banner, and was dressed in civilian clothes. His avowed intent was to lay down his life in the king’s service. Some Parliamentarians spied the standard fluttering invitingly among the king’s wavering infantry and spurred their horses towards it. Frenzied fighting followed, which saw Verney’s party whittled away by enemy swords. Sir Edmund battled on, using the point of the standard to good effect: he killed four rebels before being felled himself. So tight was his grip, even in death, that the rebel officer who captured the blood-splattered flag was forced to hack off Verney’s fist in order to carry away the prize.

The infantry debacle claimed the life of that other fatalistic Royalist, The Earl of Lindsey. He strode out at the head of his regiment, before being felled by a shot high in the thigh. He was then taken prisoner and lay in some straw in a barn while bleeding heavily. Although the wound was not in itself life-threatening, he received no medical treatment. Lindsey died after several hours of blood loss, lying in the arms of his son, Lord Willoughby, another prisoner. If it had not been for his umbrage at Rupert’s special commission from his uncle, he would most likely have been safely at the rear of the action, directing proceedings from the king’s side.

When matters in the centre of the battlefield tilted further Essex’s way, Charles’s companions urged him to flee, but he would not. The king knew that his presence was essential to his hard-pressed forces and bravely insisted on remaining with his men. Rupert eventually returned to his side, realising that his efforts to organise a meaningful cavalry force late in the day were doomed.

As hopes of a great victory faded with the light, the only positive development was the recapture of the royal standard by John Smith, one of Rupert’s cavalry captains. Smith earned a battlefield knighthood from Charles for his valour. However, the talisman would not have been forfeited in the first place, had the Royalist horse been on the battlefield to protect it instead of careering across the surrounding countryside.

Rupert was in time to see Essex prepare to close in on the right-hand side of the Royalist foot, the centre and left having already folded. But it was evening by this stage, and the lateness in the day and the reappearance of vestiges of Rupert’s horse dissuaded the earl from trying to finish off the enemy infantry.

In the freezing night-time air, both sides reformed as best they could. Neither commander knew whose day it had been: by the standards of the time, which ever side left the field of battle was considered the loser, but Royalists and Parliamentarians both held their positions throughout a night remembered by survivors for its biting cold. Some 3,000 of Essex’s stragglers, who had failed to reach Edgehill in time for the battle, now caught up with their lord general and urged him to resume the fight the following day. Across the valley, on the ridge of Edgehill, Rupert also advocated the battle’s resumption at the earliest opportunity.

However, there was shock for many of the combatants as the reality of warfare hit home. The scale of the casualties has been debated ever since, but between 1,500 and 3,000 men probably died at Edgehill, with many others fatally wounded. Nothing similar had been seen in England for over a century and a half. The struggle between Crown and Parliament had developed from a political contest to a military engagement where large numbers of compatriots had killed one another in the name of opposing causes.

In the aftermath of battle, practical considerations came into play: Essex was reluctant to risk his forces in an attack on the Royalist position, since he would expose them to Rupert’s cavalry which, for all its indiscipline, was recognised as a dangerously destructive force. For their part, the Royalist infantry was in no condition to fight again. Three of its five brigades had been routed.

Essex withdrew towards Warwick. When Rupert learned this, he persuaded his uncle to let him pursue the rebels with four mounted regiments. The prince attacked the enemy rearguard in Kineton, inflicting significant casualties and capturing prisoners, valuables, and correspondence. Among the letters addressed to the Earl of Essex were some from Blake, Rupert’s secretary, giving details of Royalist manoeuvres and requesting greater financial reward for his espionage. Rupert had Blake hanged at Oxford, days later.

Parliamentarian sources accused the prince of murdering their wounded, but these claims were false. Thick fog stopped Rupert from pursuing further: the action in Kineton was the final episode of the battle of Edgehill.

*

The result of the battle was open to interpretation. While the Royalist cavalry had triumphed, the king’s infantry had been utterly defeated. The Parliamentarians, meanwhile, had witnessed Rupert’s destruction of their horse, while celebrating the success of their foot in the centre of the field. More rebels had been killed and captured than had Royalists, and forty of the former’s regimental colours were taken, compared with a handful of Charles’s. However, more prominent figures had fallen in the king’s cause than had died for Parliament. In the wider context of the war, however, both sides had failed. Essex’s priority had been to close Charles’s route to London. In this he had failed. Equally, the Royalists had given battle at a time and place chosen by them, hopeful that they could decide the war in a day. They had seen their aims evaporate in the cloud of Digby and Byron’s indiscipline. Yet both sides quickly claimed to have triumphed: it was important, at this early stage, to be seen as the divinely-favoured party. Parliament rewarded Essex with a victor’s bounty of £5,000.

The Royalists knew that they had thrown away their great chance. ‘Sometimes the good ordering of charging the Enemy causeth victory,’ wrote a Cavalier, later in the war, ‘and the contrary sometimes causeth the destruction of the whole body.’[fn22] Prince Rupert has to take ultimate responsibility for his cavalry’s failures, as well as its successes: at Edgehill, his squadrons’ order quickly unravelled. In mitigation, controlling troopers after a successful charge demanded a level of discipline that neither side possessed so early in the war, and which the Royalists were never to attain. Eliot Warburton, Rupert’s most partisan biographer, also blamed the character flaws of the prince’s men: ‘They never could be taught discipline; jealous and proud of their independence, and fiercely chary of their fancied personal importance, control over these wild and dashing troops was unattainable even by the stern Rupert.’[fn23] After Edgehill, the prince admitted that his men ‘skewed rather too much valour’.[fn24]

One rebel observer, however, was impressed by the Royalist showing at Edgehill. Comparing the confidence of the Cavaliers with the diffidence of their own horsemen, Oliver Cromwell told his cousin John Hampden: ‘Your troopers are most of them old decayed serving men and tapsters, their troopers are gentlemen’s sons, younger sons, persons of quality. Do you think that the spirits of such base and mean fellows will ever be able to encounter gentlemen that have honour, courage and resolution in them? You must get men of a spirit that is likely to go as far as gentlemen will go, or you will be beaten still.’[fn25] If Parliament failed in this, Cromwell was sure, it would be unable to better Rupert’s proud but wayward squadrons.

When Essex withdrew after the battle, he believed that the king would look to make good his losses, and return towards his most productive recruiting grounds in Wales and the northwest. Instead Charles led his army to the rebel stronghold of Banbury, which fell to him without a fight, four days after Edgehill. At this point, with Royalist morale buoyant, Rupert urged his uncle to agree to a bold plan: he would hurry on to London with a flying army of cavalry, dragoons, and mounted musketeers, capture the members of the Lords and Commons in Westminster, and hold them at Whitehall until the king arrived with the rest of his troops. Edgehill had failed to end the rebellion, but the taking of the capital promised an immediate and successful conclusion to the war.

Charles’s advisers were unconvinced. Some expressed serious reservations about the plausibility of Rupert’s scheme. The Earl of Bristol, father of Lord Digby, revealed a distaste for Rupert’s foreign ways, voicing concern that the prince would set London on fire. The German had shown his readiness to threaten unrestrained force against the citizens of Leicester. How could he be trusted with the safety of the capital, by far the biggest city in Britain — and, with 150,000 inhabitants, the most populous city in the world?

This has been seen as a defining moment in the Civil War. Charles was never to enjoy another opportunity to march on London. Rupert could, possibly, have succeeded in his Blitzkrieg, and such was the terror at his name that his numerical inferiority to the capital’s militia, the London Trained Bands, might have been irrelevant. There was Royalist support in London, which may well have risen for Rupert. But it is hard to see the lightly armed force penetrating London’s defences, decayed though many had become. To speed his progress, Rupert would have had to leave his artillery behind and this would have further reduced his chances of success. The Earl of Warwick had also begun to raise a second Parliamentary army; it was unproven and inexperienced, but it would have been a further impediment. Among all the hypotheses, there is one certainty: Rupert’s aim of taking the Lords and Commons by surprise had absolutely no hope of success.

Charles sided with his more cautious advisers against his nephew’s plan. From Banbury he turned to Oxford, which he made the Royalist headquarters. This was a town he knew well, since repeated bouts of the plague had forced him to move there from London with court and Parliament, earlier in his reign.

‘After the famous Battle at Edgehill’, a Parliamentarian noted, ‘the first large field of blood in these Civil Wars, though the King’s Army was there much broken, yet his strength increased, and multitudes began to look towards him, as one at least wise possible not to be overcome, and in this strange confluence of men His Army seemed like that fabulous generation that sprung out of the teeth of the Cadmean Serpent buried in the earth.’[fn26] After the embarrassing fiasco of the standard-raising at Nottingham, many had thought the king would struggle to form an army. Thanks to Rupert’s energetic work with the cavalry, and Aston’s efforts with the infantry, Charles had met Essex and at least achieved parity on the battlefield. Partial success helped attract waverers to the king’s cause. If Charles were to have a hope of winning the war, Rupert and his colleagues needed to produce further success, quickly and consistently. If not, Parliament’s advantages — in terms of recruitment, armament, and control of the navy — would surely tell.

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