Blazing Star Page 2
It will remain a source of grievous disappointment for anyone interested in Rochester that his mother posthumously destroyed a huge hoard of his correspondence and other writings. The consequence is that, where we could have had a substantial body of authenticated work to enjoy and discuss, we have instead a more question-able, at times seemingly unreliable canon to deal with. Nonetheless, to quote Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, ‘We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind.’
I regret that, for reasons of space, some notable poems by Rochester (most obviously ‘A Letter from Artemisia in the Town to Chloe in the Country’) have not been covered. I can only plead that this is a biography, not an exhaustive work of literary criticism. For the sake of ease and clarity, I have reproduced all text in modern English, without attempting any further editorial interference in matters of syntax or punctuation.
* In fact, of course, it is an original work by Dexter, who faced the dilemma of how to write a Rochester pastiche that could be easily identified as not being his work.
On 4 September 1651, the flamboyant nobleman Henry Wilmot was the second most wanted man in England. The only person more eagerly hunted by Cromwell’s Commonwealth army was Charles Stuart, the 21-year-old heir apparent to the English throne. As the two fled, a bounty of £1,000 (around £80,000 today) was placed upon Charles’s head, nearly a hundred times more than the average labourer could have expected to earn in a good year. Only the most committed Royalist would not have been seduced by such a sum, and very few of them remained. Wilmot was one of the last.
The previous day had been a disastrous one for both men and their ragtag army. Despite their best efforts, they had suffered a final, irrevocable defeat to Cromwell at Worcester. Charles’s troops, mainly consisting of Scots, had been outnumbered, ill-prepared and lacking in morale. There had been a fleeting point where victory had seemed possible, thanks to Charles’s courageous attack on the Commonwealth force attacking the south-east of the city, but the odds had been hideously against them, with the Royalist forces out-numbered two to one. Charles’s rallying cry—‘I had rather you would shoot me, than let me live to see the consequences of the day!’—proved to be a hollow one.
Wilmot was one of the few surviving lords who fled the field with Charles, as the gutters of Worcester ran red with Royalist and Commonwealth gore. He was a less high-profile figure than the aristocratic courtiers, such as the Earl of Derby and the Duke of Buckingham, who surrounded Charles, and so it was to him that Charles confided his immediate plan to flee to London, rather than to take the expected decision to make for Scotland and his supporters there.
In the frantic improvisations of the day, it proved a stroke of genius on Charles’s part to have taken only Wilmot into his confidence; he was aware that the other lords, should they be captured, could only withstand so much torture before they were bound to blurt out details of his whereabouts. His concern, as it transpired, was justified; the Commonwealth soldiers proved adept at hunting down all of Charles’s remaining supporters, with the exception of Buckingham, who fled to France. Their fate was, at best, imprisonment, but more often summary execution for the dual offence of having supported Charles and for daring to have allied themselves with the unspeakable Scots.
Charles and Wilmot adopted entirely different methods of travel as they criss-crossed England. The only thing that they had in common was the danger they faced. Had they been captured, it would have represented the final glory of Cromwell’s victory. The past five years had seen Charles I’s defeat, and then his execution, followed by a brutal quashing of resistance in Ireland. Cromwell’s dictatorial power was at its height, and the public trial and almost inevitable execution of the heir to the throne would seal his reputation forever, as well as making further threats to the Commonwealth extremely unlikely. With this in mind, his soldiers were ordered to make finding Charles a priority. Posters sought ‘Charles Stuart, son of the late tyrant’, and over the next few weeks he adopted the disguise of a working man, using the pseudonym William Jackson. Charles, who had never touched manual labour before, proved a fast learner, dressing in tattered rags and uncomfortable shoes and smothering his distinctive dark looks (so much so that he was nicknamed a ‘black man’) with soot and grime.
Wilmot, by way of contrast, retained the habits of a privileged dandy. Refusing to take the sensible course of travelling around the country on foot, he instead moved from place to place on an expensive, if exhausted, horse, and took every opportunity to indulge in the fine food and living to which his status as a nobleman would have entitled him. He briefly adopted the pseudonym of Barlow, but found himself unable to remember it in times of danger and constantly changed his false names, much to his companions’ irritation.
Many years later, when Charles dictated the rather subjective story of his adventures to the diarist Samuel Pepys, he reserved a fond recollection for his old travelling companion, whose courage and loyalty were matched only by his obstinacy even in the face of danger. Charles commented that Wilmot was a figure ‘whom I still took care not to keep with me, but sent him a little before, or left to come after me’. This, given the flamboyance with which the older man conducted himself, was probably a wise move. Indeed, Charles said of Wilmot’s sartorial vanity: ‘I could never get my Lord Wilmot to put on any disguise, he saying that he should look frightfully in it, and therefore did never put on any.’ The sole compromise to which Wilmot agreed, which he quickly began to regret, was that he would carry a hawk on his hand.
For six weeks, Charles and Wilmot dragged themselves over England. Legends soon arose, the most famous being of the oak tree in Boscobel House that Charles was obliged to scramble up while Commonwealth soldiers searched the grounds below, thus giving countless subsequent pubs the name ‘The Royal Oak’. Dissemination of false rumours was rife; two of the favoured stories reported in the contemporary press were that Charles had fallen in with a notorious highwayman, Captain Hinde—presumably because he was the son of the executed monarch, association with brigands could not be too far away—and that he had adopted women’s clothing as a disguise. Given that Charles was well over six foot tall,* with a swarthy complexion, this would seem fanciful, but it was nevertheless taken up by Cromwell’s council of state as accurate fact.
It was a difficult, often tedious time. Charles was frequently reduced to boring holes through his small supply of gold coins for distraction, which were then handed out to those who had given him assistance. Danger was constantly near, and there were many close calls, such as when Charles had to be smuggled into a priest’s hole because a gang of Commonwealth soldiers had heard a (correct) rumour that he was being concealed in Moseley Hall, which belonged to the Catholic and Royalist sympathizer Thomas Whitgreave. Thanks to Whitgreave’s presence of mind in leaving the doors to the house conspicuously open and his pleading of ill health, Charles’s luck held and his hiding place remained undiscovered. There was also a frustrating near miss when a promised escape from Charmouth in Dorset was foiled. This was said to have been because the sailor tasked with carrying the king and Wilmot to safety was locked in his house by his wife, who had guessed his intentions and was determined not to be left a widow should the result of the expedition prove fatal. Certainly, any boat carrying Charles would have been attacked on sight.
Eventually, thanks to the support and help of Royalist supporters, sympathetic Catholics and other well-wishers, Wilmot and Charles were carried across the Channel, landing in Normandy on 16 October. Even on their crossing luck had been on their side; a Common-wealth boat was searching for ‘a tall black man, six feet two inches high’, but the journey was a swift and uneventful one, and they were undetected. They entered Paris late on the 20th, where they were escorted triumphantly to the Louvre by Charles’s brother James, Duke of York, his mother Henrietta Maria and other Royalist aristocrats. The news of Charles’s escape was soon common know-ledge throughout
Europe. The leaders of the Commonwealth, who only days before had been speculating that Charles was at large some-where in Worcester, were taken by surprise, but the propaganda machine soon recovered sufficiently to produce a mocking poster of Charles as ‘a fool on horseback, riding backwards, turning his face every which way in fears’.
The consequences of Charles’s death-defying escape, and Henry Wilmot’s part in it, are crucial to understanding both Charles’s psychology and his later relationship with Henry’s son John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester. Although Charles undoubtedly suffered a good deal of physical discomfort and fear, as well as boredom, in the weeks between his defeat at Worcester and his arrival in France, his adventures were a source of excitement to him as well. He was still reminiscing about those weeks towards the end of his life, when he dictated a lengthy account of his travails to Pepys after a session at the Newmarket races; it was a story Pepys had heard the king tell before, some years earlier, when the royal yacht was approaching the shores of England on the eve of the Restoration.
Regardless of the many unfair, unkind or cruel things Charles did when he was king—and there were a good number that fell into all three categories—the period when he was on the run showed him at his best, possessed of a quick wit, sharp intelligence and boundless courage. Numerous eyewitness accounts testify to his ease at dealing with his future subjects in circumstances that no member of royalty would ever have conceived hitherto, and this sense of familiarity was something he never lost when he became monarch. His gratitude towards those who had helped him became legendary, with anyone who had given him shelter and aid awarded pensions and annuities, in some cases for time immemorial.
His greatest debt was to Wilmot. Foolish and vain though his friend had sometimes been, his boldness and constancy had proved vital in desperate circumstances. He was created Earl of Rochester in France in 1652, with the aim of lending more weight to Wilmot’s status as a petitioner around the European courts, asking for support for Charles in exile. It might have seemed a mostly meaningless title, a bauble handed out by one exile to another, but, in due course, it would become a vital part of Wilmot’s son’s existence. As the two men received a heroic welcome in France, it was noted that Charles was both ‘sad and sombre’. He was a king, but in name only, and he was destined to live on the charity of others until the Commonwealth came to an end. His comrade-in-arms might well have felt the same, had he considered what a quieter and less swashbuckling life might have been like with his wife and young son in Oxfordshire. As it was, he would never know.
Wilmot had already led an eventful existence by the time of the escape. Charles’s mentor and adviser Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, made some grudgingly admiring comments that perhaps sum him up best:
He was a man proud and ambitious, and incapable of being contented; an orderly officer in marches and governing his troops. He drank hard, and had a great power over all who did so, which was a great people.
Born on 26 October 1612, he had inherited the title of viscount after his father Charles and his two brothers had all died. He was a vehement anti-Parliamentarian, and equally vigorous Royalist. For services to Charles I, he was created Baron Wilmot of Adder-bury, where he had a large and impressive manor house. He had also behaved with notable valour at the battles of Edgehill and Cropredy Bridge, where he had taken over Prince Rupert’s position as commander of the Royalist cavalry. However, he had fallen out of favour with Charles for making unauthorized contact with the Parliamentarian commander-in-chief, Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, to try and broker a peace. As a result, Wilmot was briefly incarcerated in Exeter. After his release he headed to France in 1644, where he rightly believed he would be received as a welcome guest of the queen, Henrietta Maria, who admired his chutzpah and commitment to the Royalist cause. Upon his return to England, his conspicuous loyalty did not go un-noticed by Charles the younger, who made him one of his Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, and he facilitated the young prince’s first serious love affair with the ‘brown, bold, beautiful but insipid’ aristocrat Lucy Walter, which led to the birth of the first of Charles’s many bastard children: James. It was Wilmot who would later be responsible for the deal hatched with the Scottish armies, and he who stuck by Charles’s side throughout.
In the course of a vigorous, hard-living and brief existence, Henry Wilmot first married Frances Morton in 1633, and after her death, Anne Lee in 1644. Anne’s father, Sir John St John, was also a very prominent Royalist, and she, like Wilmot, was marrying for the second time; her first husband, Sir Francis Henry Lee, had died of smallpox in 1639. Her first child with Lee, also called Francis, was born the same year, and she soon had a second, Henry. Wilmot was not a man to be denied the pleasures of the conjugal bed, and his son with Anne—John—was born at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire on 1 April 1647, All Fool’s Day. The irony would not escape Wilmot’s heir in later years.
The astrologer John Gadbury later wrote of John Wilmot’s birth, no doubt with the considerable benefit of hindsight, that the stars upon his arrival in the world ‘bestowed a large stock of generous and active spirits, which constantly attended on this native’s mind, insomuch that no subject came amiss to him’. There were doubts over Henry Wilmot’s paternity; in an age where bastardy was both common and the first tool of disinheritance, John’s legitimacy was crucial. The antiquary Anthony à Wood wrote, ‘I have been credibly informed by knowing men that this John, Earl of Rochester, was begotten by Sir Allen Apsley’, a familiar of Charles, and goes on to describe Anne Wilmot as ‘one notorious for her salaciousness’. However, Anne’s overt piety and Apsley’s military distractions after the fall of Barnstaple in April 1646 render this piece of tittle-tattle highly unlikely, on top of which the gossip circulated decades after the fact, by which time John himself had established a notorious reputation for salaciousness.
Likewise, although Wilmot was sporadically on the continent from his marriage in 1644, it was not until the fall of Oxford in June 1646 that his presence in England would have been potentially fatal. John’s conception took place before Wilmot left England for France; it is conceivable that Anne accompanied him for a few weeks before returning, although the necessities of looking after her two elder sons make this an unlikely course of action. According to the usually reliable papers of the Earl of Clarendon, Wilmot—who, like his son John, took a delight in play-acting and subterfuge—was in July 1646 a secret visitor to Ditchley Park, the family home of Anne Wilmot’s first husband, which she had then inherited, and this is a likely date for the conception.
Other compelling reasons for stating categorically that Henry Wilmot was John Wilmot’s father include the strong, near-uncanny physical and social similarities between the two men. Both had the same heavy-lidded eyes and lazy half-smile, which offered seductive grace to women and convivial charm to men. Wilmot’s drinking was well known to his contemporaries, although it did not blind him to his duties. Clarendon, who would later become an important figure in John’s life, wrote: ‘Wilmot loved debauchery, but shut it out from his business; never neglected that, and rarely miscarried in it.’ Although this might seem at odds with some of his more colourful antics after the Battle of Worcester, the father and the son were as one in being men who were fiercely loyal to their true friends. As Clarendon said of Wilmot père, he ‘violated [friendships]... less willingly, and never but for some great benefit or convenience to himself’.
Regardless of Wilmot’s bravery and integrity, and that of those around him, there was little hope for the Royalist cause in early 1647. Cromwell’s victory the previous year had been absolute, crushing the forces and spirits alike of his enemies. After fleeing from Oxford, Charles I had been sent around the country like an unwanted but crucial parcel. First, he was handed over to the English Parliament by the Scots and imprisoned in Holdenby House in Northamptonshire in January 1647. Here he stayed in uneasy spirits until June that year, when he became a political pawn in the tensions between the New Mo
del Army, led by the moderate Thomas Fairfax, and Cromwell’s Parliament. Fairfax’s associate George Joyce seized Charles in June, transporting him to their headquarters at Thirplow Heath outside Cambridge, a move that strengthened their position even as it simultaneously undermined Cromwell’s. The king was, after all, the most impressive hostage that anyone could hope to possess and, at this stage, was seen as a crucial part of whatever order arose from the ashes of the first civil war. A country without a king still seemed an impossibility.
As Wilmot cooled his heels in France at the court of the exiled queen Henrietta Maria in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, his wife was in the difficult position of raising her children single-handedly and attempting to cope with a national climate that was hostile towards her and all she stood for. Already a widow, she had to toe the delicate line between Parliamentary might and the Royalist sympathy that informed her character. Her first husband had been an ardent Parliamentarian, and given the puritan (with a small ‘p’) side to her nature, it was likely that she felt at least some sympathy towards this new era of austerity and godliness. (It should be noted, however, that Wilmot, like most of his peers, was far from being an unbeliever; Clarendon wrote that he ‘had more scruples from religion to startle him, and would not have attained his end by any gross or foul act of wickedness’.)