Free King Charles II by Antonia Fraser

King consisted in advancing various expedients for limiting his powers, and trying to work out some practical way in which his alleged tyranny could be held in check. As a result, certain members of the House of Commons decided to explore the notion of transferring the royal role into the hands of the Prince of Wales. Little was really known of Charles in England at this point: might he not prove more amenable to the idea of monarchy limited in its powers by Parliament? The answer from Charles was of course a firm negative – thereafter when these expedients were explored by Parliament it would be in terms of the younger princes: James, even Henry.
    When rumours of the King’s secret agreement with the Scots leaked out, the Army and the Independents in Parliament were together confirmed in their disgust. Negotiations with the King were formally broken off at the beginning of the year when a Vote of No Addresses was passed by Parliament.
    In the meantime the King’s intrigues appeared to have had a successful outcome: they had combined Royalists and Presbyterians in a further outbreak of fighting, which began with a Royalist insurrection in Wales and culminated in a Scottish invasion. This, the Second Civil War, was blamed by the Army leaders on the King’s double-dealing: he earned from them the unpleasant sobriquet of ‘the man of blood’. Charles’ positionwas made clear by the fact that commissions were issued in his name to various Royalist commanders, including Langdale in the north and Byron in the north-west. A signature was however still the sole measure of contribution by the unhappy Prince.
    By now the Engagers in Scotland were longing equally for the éclat of the Prince’s presence. Charles, the boy who, at the age of twelve, had drawn his sword at Edgehill and shouted, ‘I fear them not!’, was still kept prudently in reserve, like a weapon of uncertain provenance.
    Nevertheless, the moment of decision could not be much longer delayed. On 9 March a heated debate took place in the Prince’s Council. The Queen had given way and agreed to his departure. Hyde’s known views were overruled.
    At the end of the meeting ‘the Prince’s resolution was taken without more ceremony to come into Scotland’. By 23 March his offer was known in Edinburgh and on 1 May the Duke of Hamilton, the Earl Lauderdale and three other Engagers formally requested the arrival of the Prince of Wales. On 30 May Charles himself wrote back in the most flattering terms that he was ‘inexpressibly desirous of himself and impatient to be amongst them’. 9
    Nevertheless, the Prince of Wales did not arrive in Scotland. By August, when the Scottish army passed lumberingly into England, he had still not arrived. His part in the Second Civil War was totally, not to say fatally, mismanaged by his elders and advisers.
    What now transpired, put briefly (although the expression of it was not brief at the time), was the re-emergence of all the old worries in Royalist circles about the Scots. Instead of permitting the Prince to depart, his advisers sent off renewed cautious enquiries concerning the use of an English prayer book in his private devotions, and similar questions which were surely of little import compared to the vast issue at stake – the defeat of the Parliamentary Army.
    Perhaps it might after all be better to despatch the Prince to Ireland. … The old mildew of indecision concerning the relative merits of Scotland and Ireland as a jumping-off ground continuedto blight the Royalist counsels during this critical summer. Yet a realistic appraisal of the Irish situation should have made its relative weakness clear.
    Ireland was full of armies. The island itself was inhabited by an enormous variety of factions, in which religion and ethnic origin made many weird combinations – there were Anglican English, Anglican Anglo-Irish, Catholic Anglo-Irish, Catholic Irish and Presbyterian Scots, and that was not the end of it. Nearly all