Ormond, Capel, and others of the Royalists who were chief in the King's counsels; and Cromwell had his means of guessing.1 The mutinous disposition of so many Regiments, and its manifestation in such tracts as The Case of the Army and the Agreement of the People, had greatly alarmed Parliament. The investigation of the matter had been substantially left, however, in the hands of Fairfax and the Council of War at Putney. That Council, with Fairfax and Cromwell present in it, had appointed a special Committee of Inquiry, consisting of twenty officers with Ireton at their head; and in a series of meetings of this Committee and of the collective Council itself, extending from Oct. 22 to Nov. 8, things were brought to a kind of adjustment. There was to be a general Rendezvous of the Army for ending of disorder; and meanwhile certain new Proposals were sketched out, to be presented to Parliament as a summary of what might now be considered the opinions of the chief representatives of the Army, reviewing their former Proposals of Aug. 1 in the light of all that had since occurred. So far as the Proposals were sketched out, one observes in them a curious combination of compromises. There is decidedly greater severity in them to the King than in the original Army Proposals. On the other hand, there is nothing about the abolition of Kingship or of the House of Lords, no concession on these points to the ultra-democratic tendency of the Levellers. The question of King or No King had been raised, it is said, in the Council meetings by the Agitators, but had been quashed by the chief officers. Again, rather strangely, the question of Liberty of Conscience and the terms of the establishment of Presbytery is entirely waived, unless we regard the provision that Delinquents should be obliged to take the Covenant before being admitted to compound as a sign that on this question too there was a recession from former liberality. On the whole, the new Army Proposals 1 For the interesting and instructive correspondence of Charles with Lanark from June 1647 onwards, with details of the negotiations after Lanark and Loudoun joined Lauderdale at Hampton look like a jumble of incongruities, and rather disappoint one after the clear political comprehensiveness of the original Proposals which Ireton had drafted, or even the rude simplification of the same put forth by the democratic Agitators. The reason probably was that the Army-chiefs desired at the moment to patch up a concordat, suppressing all unnecessary appearance of difference between the Parliament and the Army, and bringing both as amicably as possible into the one direct track of the new set of Parliamentary Propositions to the King.1 On the 10th of November, all the Propositions being ready, a very emphatic Preamble to them was agreed upon by the two Houses. It was intended that they should be presented to the King formally at Hampton Court within the next few days. Before that could be done, however, his Majesty had vanished. The vicinity of Putney, with exasperated Levellers and Agitators all about, had become really unsafe for Charles; and, after some meditation and hesitation, he had himself arranged a plan of escape. It was put in execution on Thursday the 11th of November. On the evening of that day his Majesty, accompanied by Mr. Ashburnham, Mr. William Legge, and Sir John Berkley, contrived to slip out of Hampton Court Palace, by the back garden, unobserved. It was supper-time before he was missed by Whalley and the guard; the night was excessively dark and stormy; and, though it was ascertained that he and his companions had mounted horses near the Palace, the route they had taken could not be guessed. For the next two or three days, therefore, London was all anxiety. Meanwhile the fugitives, guided by the King himself through the New Forest, had reached the south coast, near Southampton, and in sight of the Isle of Wight. The King's reasons for taking this direction appear to have been the vaguest; nor is it certainly known that the Isle of Wight had been in his mind when he left Hampton Court. No ship, however, having been provided for a more distant voyage, and the King being in any case irresolute about yet leaving England altogether, 1 Rushworth, VII. 849-866; Godwin, II. 450-454. the island did now, if not before, occur to him as suitable for his purpose. One inducement may have been that the Governor, young Colonel Robert Hammond, was a person whom the King had reason to believe as well disposed to him as any Parliamentarian officer. Hammond, indeed, was the nephew of the King's favourite chaplain, Dr. Henry Hammond; and, though he was one of Cromwell's admiring disciples, and had married a daughter of Hampden, his uncle's reasonings, or other influences, had begun of late to weaken. his ardour. It had been with undisguised pleasure that, but a week or two before, he had left his post in the Army and gone to this quiet and distant governorship, where he might live in retirement and without active duty. What, then, was his horror when, on the morning of Saturday, Nov. 13, as he was riding along the road near his residence of Carisbrooke Castle, in the centre of the island, Sir John Berkley and Mr. Ashburnham presented themselves, and told him that the King had fled in their company from Hampton Court and desired to be his guest! "He grew so pale," says Berkley, "and fell into such a trembling, that I did really 'believe he would have fallen from his horse; which ."trembling continued with him at least an hour after, in "which he broke out into passionate and distracted ex"pressions, sometimes saying 'O gentlemen, you have "undone me."" He collected himself at length, however, and accepted the duty which fate had sent him. Crossing over, with Berkley and Ashburnham, to the Earl of Southampton's house of Titchfield on the mainland, where Charles had meanwhile been waiting with Legge, he paid his homage gravely enough; and, after some conversation, in which he promised to do all for his Majesty that might be consistent with his obedience to Parliament, he returned to the island, with the King in his charge, and Berkley, Ashburnham, and Legge in attendance. His letter, narrating what had happened, and asking instructions, was read in the two Houses of Parliament on Monday, Nov. 15.1 1 Berkley's Memoir, Harl. Miscell. IX. 479–483; Rushworth, VII. 871— 874; Clar. 624-7; Parl. Hist. III. 785791. As usual, in the later Royalist FOURTH STAGE OF THE CAPTIVITY: IN THE ISLE OF WIGHT: NOV. 1647-NOV. 1648. Carisbrooke Castle, and the King's Letters thence-Parliament's New Method of the Four Bills-Indignation of the Scots; their Complaints of Breach of the Covenant-Army Rendezvous at Ware: Suppression of a Mutiny of Levellers by Cromwell, and Establishment of the Concordat with Parliament-Parliamentary Commissioners in the Isle of Wight: Scottish Commissioners also there: the King's Rejection of the Four Bills -Firmness of Parliament: their Resolutions of No Farther Addresses to the King: Severance of the Scottish Alliance—The Engagement, or Secret Treaty between Charles and the Scots in the Isle of Wight-Stricter guard of the King in Carisbrooke Castle : His Habits in his Imprisonment ---First Rumours of The Scottish Engagement: Royalist Programme of a SECOND CIVIL WAR-Beginnings of THE SECOND CIVIL WAR: Royalist Risings Cromwell in Wales: Fairfax in the South-east: Siege of Colchester-Revolt of the Fleet: Commotion among the Royalist Exiles abroad: Holland's attempted Rising in Surrey-Invasion of England by Hamilton's Scottish Army: Arrival of the Prince of Wales off the Southeast Coast: Blockade of the Thames-Consternation of the Londoners : Faintheartedness of Parliament: New Hopes of the Presbyterians: their Ordinance against Heresies and Blasphemies: their Leanings to the King: Independents in a struggling minority: Charge of Treason against Cromwell in his absence-The Three Days' Battle of Preston and utter Defeat of the Scots by Cromwell: Surrender of Colchester to Fairfax: Return of the Prince of Wales to Holland: Virtual End of THE SECOND CIVIL WAR-Parliamentary Treaty with the King at Newport: Unsatis factory Results-Protests against the Treaty by the IndependentsDisgust of the Army with the Treaty: Revocation of their Concordat with Parliament, and Resolution to seize the Political Mastery: Formation of a Republican Party-Petitions for Justice on the King: The Grand Army Remonstrance-Cromwell in Scotland: Restoration of the Argyle Government there: Cromwell at Pontefract: His Letter to Hammond-The King removed from the Isle of Wight to Hurst Castle -The Army again in possession of London. Carisbrooke Castle, now mostly a ruin, but in Charles's time the chief fortified place in the Isle of Wight, stands almost in the centre of the island, close to the village of Carisbrooke, and near the town of Newport, which, although really accounts, it is Cromwell that had contrived the whole affair of the King's escape, both matter and form. Hammond's appointment to the Governorship of the island (Sept. 9) was Cromwell's doing, in anticipation of what might be needed; then he had stirred up the Agitators at Putney to threaten the King's life at Hampton Court; then he had warned the King, through Whalley, of the designs of the Agitators, so as to frighten him into flight; then, through Ashburnham or otherwise, he had suggested the Isle of Wight as the very place for the King to go to, and so had caught him in the prepared trap!! an inland town, communicates with the sea by a navigable river. Here, with the verdant island all round him, and fine views both of land and sea, Charles was to live for a whole year. Though it was November when he came into the island, a lady, as he passed through Newport on his way to Carisbrooke, could present him with a damask-rose just picked from her garden; and he was to see all the circle of seasons in that mild South-English climate, till November came round again.1 In a letter which Charles had left at Hampton Court, to be communicated to the two Houses, he had avowed that, though security from threatened violence was the immediate reason for his disappearance for a time into a place of retirement, yet another reason was his desire to extricate himself from a negotiation in which he felt that the "chief interests" concerned were not all represented. In the same spirit of eclecticism, with a word for each of the "chief interests," and a special show of solicitude for the Army, is a Letter sent by the King to the two Houses only four days after he had been in the Isle of Wight (Nov. 17). It gives his Majesty's view of what would be the right kind of negotiation, and conveys his definite offers. He cannot consent to the abolition of Episcopacy, but he will assent to the experiment of Presbytery for three years, if accompanied by a Toleration, but not for Papists, Atheists, and Blasphemers; he will surrender the Militia for his own life, on condition that it shall afterwards revert to the Crown; he will undertake for the Arrears of the Army; and on other matters he will be ready to do his utmost in a conclusive Personal Treaty in London.2 The two Houses retained their own ideas of the negotiation necessary; and, while giving orders for the despatch of a sufficient guard to the Isle of Wight, to be under Hammond's command, and also for the King's household comforts at Carisbrooke, the servants to be sent to him, &c., 1 Herbert, 55, 56. 2 Rushworth, VII. 871-2 and 880833; Parl. Hist. III. 786-7 and 799–802; VOL. III. and King Charles's Works (1651), 117— 125. |