The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain by Massie Allan

Author:Massie, Allan [Massie, Allan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2011-12-19T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

The Interregnum and the Scattered Family (1649–60)

The news of the King’s execution shocked the courts of Europe. Few probably would have been surprised, or even distressed, if he had been quietly strangled or poisoned in his prison. Assassination had often been the means of ridding a nation of its unpopular or unsuccessful monarch. But for his subjects to put an anointed king on trial and then strike off his head as if he had been a common criminal, that was another matter altogether, one that struck at the roots of all legitimacy. Nevertheless, it was not long before the dictator Cromwell was treated as an equal by foreign courts, receiving the marks of respect commonly accorded to power. England had been weak, of little account in European politics. Now she was strong. However unsuccessful Cromwell proved at home, where his constitutional experiments all failed and he had no more success in dealing with the various parliaments he devised than Charles had had in his relations with the House of Commons, the Lord Protector, as he styled himself, made England feared and admired abroad. ‘I desire,’ he said, ‘the English Republic to be as much respected as was the Roman Republic in ancient times’;1 and his desire was satisfied. He humbled the Dutch at sea, made successful war on Spain, and formed an alliance with France. Despite the close family ties between the Bourbon monarchy and the Stuarts, the French court went into formal mourning when the great dictator died in 1658.

Meanwhile, throughout the years of his rule, the Stuarts lived in exile and poverty, as did so many of their adherents. Some of the royalist exiles in time despaired and made peace with the republicans, enabling them to return home and in some cases repair their fortunes and regain their estates. No such accommodation was possible for members of the royal family. They were condemned to wait till the wheel of fortune might turn – something that seemed unlikely in the high years of Cromwell’s rule.

Those who remained in exile were loyal to the new king, Charles II, as of course were many royalists in England, Scotland and Ireland. He might be a king without a state, but he was still a king, head of a government-in-exile, with ministers who had nothing but the affairs of his peripatetic court to administer. Foreign monarchs too recognised him as king, except when they sought friendly relations with the English republic and found Charles to be an embarrassment.

His mother, Henrietta Maria, as a daughter of France, spent the years of exile in Paris. During the disturbances known as the Fronde – a series of civil wars (1648–50) that seemed light-minded and whimsical in comparison with the grim and bloody constitutional struggle in her husband’s kingdoms – her circumstances were often miserable. The Cardinal de Retz, one of the instigators of the Fronde, remembered them when he came to write his memoirs:

Four or five days before the king [the young Louis XIV] removed

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