The King's Revenge by Michael Walsh & Don Jordan

Author:Michael Walsh & Don Jordan [Walsh, Michael & Jordan, Don]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9780748126545
Google: x2LdireGr8QC
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2012-08-27T16:00:00+00:00

stroked all that were brought to him and then put about each of their necks a white ribbon with an angel of gold on it. In this manner His Majesty stroked above 600 and such was his princely patience and tenderness to the poor afflicted creatures that though it took up a long time the King being never weary of well doing was pleased to make inquiry as to whether there were any who had not been touched …

The following month it was announced that in future, the king would perform this service only on Fridays, and to crowds of no more than two hundred, and they had to apply to the Royal Surgeon for tickets.

Some people placed boundless faith in the king’s messianic powers of healing. John Aubrey’s Miscellanies featured an Avis Evans who had a ‘fungus nose and said it was revealed to him that the King’s hand would cure him. And at the first coming of King Charles II into St James Park he kissed the King’s hand and rubbed his nose with it which disturbed the King but cured him’. The following April, Charles claimed to have touched between fifteen and sixteen thousand people, but no longer. He announced that on his physicians’ advice he was ‘to forbear for the present to touch anyone’.

Charles was besieged with petitioners. The state archive is stacked with petitions dated May 1660 from aspiring state servants – among them would-be chamberlains, clerks of the Mint, clerks of the Exchequer, tellers, messengers of the chamber or council, masters of requests, clerks of the Pells, comptrollers, coiners and engravers. John Evelyn’s diary records how he arrived at Whitehall with letters from Henrietta Maria to deliver to the palace, but was unable to get through the human scrum. ‘It was indeed intolerable as well as inexpressible, the greediness of all sorts of men, women and children to see His Majesty and kiss his hands in so much as he had scarce leisure to eat for some days, coming as they did from all parts of the nation.’

In July and August, the demands for retribution reached a peak – and not only retribution for the king. Across the country royalists demanded redress or revenge for their own individual losses, human and material, at the hands of Parliament. None were more persistent and passionate than Arundel Penruddock, whose sense of injustice at the execution of a beloved husband would leave its mark not just on Charles’s reign but on that of his successor too.

Arundel Penruddock had petitioned unsuccessfully for her husband’s life five years earlier. Now she was back, along with the widows of some of her husband’s men, petitioning for retribution over their deaths. The similar wording of the petitions suggests that this was a coordinated campaign. Full of anger and bitterness, the petitions were targeted at the officer who, the widows said, had promised their men quarter and the members of the Cromwellian judiciary who tried and condemned them. These included the Lord Chief Justice Lord Rolle and the regicide John Lisle.

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