The royal wife who REALLY wore the trousers
On the afternoon of January 30, 1649, Charles I stepped through a window at Whitehall’s Banqueting house and on to the scaffold erected for his execution.
Famously, he was wearing two shirts. It was a cold day and he did not want the crowd to think he was shivering from fear. ‘I fear not death!’ he told attendants.
Waiting for him was his executioner. the man, terrified of later being recognised as the king’s killer, was sporting not only a fishnet mask, but also a false beard.
As Charles prepared to rest his head on the block, he said to the executioner: ‘ Does my hair trouble you?’ It did, and the man helped him to tuck it away under the nightcap Charles was wearing.
Minutes later, the king was dead. In a final indignity, when the executioner’s assistant lifted Charles’s head to show it to the crowd, he dropped it.
Leanda de Lisle’s very readable new biography of the king reveals the twisting path through love, politics and war that led him to his ultimate destination.
It goes a long way towards explaining why Charles, like his grandmother, Mary, Queen of Scots, ended his life on the executioner’s block.
Charles was not expected to become king in the first place. he was not a robust child. his legs lacked strength and he had trouble walking, although determined exercise did improve his problems. he was born with a deformity of the tongue. his father, James I, once threatened to have the tendons under it cut to help him speak more clearly.
More significantly, Charles had an elder brother, henry, on whom the dynastic hopes were pinned. Unfortunately, in 1612, henry caught typhoid fever.
the doctors tried a number of unlikely remedies, including tying a dead pigeon to the boy’s head. Unsurprisingly, none of them worked. henry died and the young Charles became heir to the throne.
his first mentor was his father’s favourite, the improbably handsome George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who had such a close relationship with the royal Family that he once told the young prince, in a rage, to ‘kiss [his] a**e’. he suffered no more than a mild rebuke. When Buckingham was murdered in 1628, three years after Charles came to the throne, the king was inconsolable. he mourned his friend ‘with much passion and with abundance of tears’.
By this time, however, the king had embarked on the most important relationship of his life — with his French queen, henrietta Maria. At times, de Lisle’s book seems almost as much a biography of her as it is of Charles. henrietta Maria’s Catholicism caused difficulties throughout the marriage. In its early days, her priests persuaded her to refuse to have sex on the church’s holy Days. there were lots of them and the frustrated king complained bitterly.
More seriously, as the religious conflicts of the reign deepened, she became the focus for antiCatholic feeling. (this was so strong that, at one point, John Pym, a leader of the Puritan faction in Parliament, suggested that Catholics should be forced to wear distinctive clothing, like Jews in medieval europe.)
She was called the ‘popish brat of France’ and worshippers emerging from Mass in her private chapel were attacked ‘furiously with stones and weapons’.
During the Civil War, there were rumours that she ruled, and overruled, her husband. She was, according to one source, ‘the true controller of the breeches’. Yet, as de Lisle makes very clear, there is no doubting the love that developed between the king and queen.
When the war forced them to part at Dover in 1642, he was seen ‘conversing with her in sweet discourse and affectionate embraces’. neither of them was able to ‘restrain their tears’.
As her ship sailed away, Charles rode along the shore waving his hat, until the mast disappeared from view.
nor is there any question about henrietta Maria’s courage. the following year, she landed back in england on the Yorkshire coast. her party came under fire from Parliamentarian soldiers.
‘the balls were whistling upon me,’ she wrote to Charles, ‘and you may easily believe I loved not such music.’ One man was killed, ‘torn and mangled with great shot’ only 20 paces from her.
CHARLES himself did not lack courage. he was also convinced of the rightness of his cause. ‘God will not suffer rebels to prosper,’ he told his followers during the Civil War.
he was wrong. he ended it on trial for his life, accused of being ‘a tyrant, traitor, murderer and a public and implacable enemy to the Commonwealth of england’.
When he left the court, soldiers standing in the passageways jeered and blew pipe smoke in his face. he was destined for that last encounter with the masked executioner and his axe.