Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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who was promoted that very morning to commissary-general (second-

in-command of the cavalry), was ranged against both Rupert and Maurice,

riding at the heads of their own regiments. Opposite Skippon in the centre

was the 66-year-old Lord Astley, who had commanded the royalist infantry

since the war began. His men were outnumbered by seven to four and had

slept little since their 20-mile march the day before, but they fought most

bravely.

The royalists began the battle in mid-morning with an assault along the

whole front. The ﬁrst line of the New Model foot buckled and fell back in dis-

order; Skippon was severely wounded, though he refused to leave the ﬁeld.

To his left the charge of the two princes carried all before it, putting much of

Ireton’s cavalry to rout. Ireton too was wounded, and temporarily taken pris-

oner. Everything now hung on the right, where Cromwell’s veteran regiments

had a numerical advantage. They were completely victorious, but it was his

control of them that saved the day for the parliament. Detaching just enough

of them to pursue Langdale’s ﬂeeing horsemen, he kept the remainder intact

and used them to turn the tide of battle on the rest of the ﬁeld. It is not easy to

check triumphant cavalry when they see their opponents break and ﬂee, and

Rupert signally failed to do so. He joined his men in a pursuit that careered on

for a mile and a half until he and they reached the New Model’s baggage train.

There they received a check, and by the time they got back to where the

infantry battle was raging the day was all but lost. Cromwell had caught

Astley’s gallant men without cavalry support, and Fairfax, who was never out

of the thick of the ﬁghting, had regrouped his forces in a fresh order of battle.

The king himself was prevented from trying to lead a desperate attempt to

turn the tide, and less than three hours after battle had commenced he was in

ﬂight with whatever of his forces could get away.

With eight or more hours to go before nightfall gave them some cover, his

ﬂeeing cavalry were pursued with heavy slaughter to within sight of Leices-

ter. Fewer than 4,000 got away to safety. His infantry had no choice but to

surrender on quarter, and over 4,500 prisoners were on the march towards

London next day. About 500 more were too badly wounded to be moved far,

and the total number of royalist dead, including those killed in ﬂight or dying

of wounds, probably came to at least 1,000. By contrast the New Model

probably lost no more than 200, including the wounded who did not re-

cover. The most pitiable casualties were the women who followed the royal

army, many of whom were taken for Irish, though as Veronica Wedgwood

has suggested they may well have been the wives of Welsh soldiers.

At least

a hundred were barbarously slaughtered on the spot, while most of the rest

had their faces slashed or their noses slit to mark them as whores.

318 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

Wedgwood, King’s War 1641–1647, p. 455.

ch10.y8 27/9/02 11:11 AM Page 318

The king’s army also lost all its guns and wagons, in which was found a rich

haul of his secret papers, including his correspondence with the queen. This

laid bare his hopes of bringing an army of native Irish into England and of

obtaining money and mercenaries from foreign princes, as well as his readi-

ness to consider granting toleration to English papists. These letters, pub-

lished as The King’s Cabinet Opened, created a sensation and did him

immense harm. To add to his misfortunes, his garrison in Leicester was forced

to surrender three days after the battle.

Naseby naturally gave a great boost to the New Model’s morale. Fairfax

lost far more men through desertion than in battle, for many of his foot sol-

diers slipped off home with the booty that they took from the royalist dead,

wounded, and prisoners. In the pursuit Cromwell had forbidden his horsemen

to dismount for plunder on pain of death—an unpopular order, but it seems

to have been obeyed. In a memorable dispatch to the Speaker dictated late on

the very day of the battle, he rightly praised Fairfax’s conduct in it but said

nothing about his own. He gave all the glory to God, but he did not forget the

soldiery: ‘Honest men served you faithfully in this action. Sir, they are trusty;

I beseech you in the name of God, not to discourage them. . . . He that ven-

tures his life for the liberty of his country, I wish he trust God for the liberty

of his conscience, and you for the liberty he ﬁghts for.’

The Commons, in

ordering his dispatch to be printed, deleted this whole passage. Fortunately

the Lords sanctioned its publication intact, so both versions appeared on the

bookstalls. The Lords also graciously assented to Cromwell’s appointment as

lieutenant-general, though only for three months, whereas the Commons

voted to extend it indeﬁnitely. Both reactions must have warned him, if he

needed warning, that he would have political battles to ﬁght when the mili-

tary ones were won. But in the military sphere Naseby was the decisive one,

and he was not mistaken about its bearing on the future liberty of his coun-

try. A modern government has honoured the dead of the most important

battle on English soil since Hastings by driving a motorway through a part of

the ﬁeld over which Rupert’s cavalry pursued Ireton’s beaten men and later

returned to the ﬁght.

The king, after a brief stay in Hereford, spent the ﬁrst half of July with the

Marquis of Worcester at Raglan Castle. Within a week of the battle Digby

was writing diplomatically that ‘the consequences of this disaster will not

have great extent’,

and Charles was putting a good face on it. But on 23 June

he wrote a letter to the 15-year-old Prince of Wales in terms which show that

he was now, perhaps for the ﬁrst time, contemplating the possibility of defeat.

Towards a Resolution 319

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, I, 360.

Quoted in C. Carlton, Charles I: The Personal Monarch (1983), p. 288.

ch10.y8 27/9/02 11:11 AM Page 319

He solemnly commanded his son, should he, the king, ever be taken prisoner,

not to yield to any conditions that were dishonourable, or ‘derogatory to

regal authority’, even to save his father’s life.

In more sanguine moments,

however, he was still hoping to rebuild an army as good as ever he had com-

manded. For a nucleus he had the cavalry that had survived Naseby and

about 3,000 infantry, mostly the Welsh levies that he had failed to collect

before the battle. But Rupert, whom he had sent to defend Bristol, wrote to

him in July, venturing his opinion that he should treat for peace, believing it

to be ‘a more prudent way to retain something than to lose it all’. Charles

resented the advice and forbade Rupert to repeat it. ‘Speaking as a mere sol-

dier or statesman,’ he wrote, ‘I must say that there is no probability but of my

ruin; yet as a Christian, I must tell you that God will not suffer rebels or trai-

tors to prosper.’

That for Charles was an article of faith, and it would sus-

tain him through all his misfortunes. For the present he was looking mainly

to Ireland for help, and after Naseby he hastened the departure thither of the

Earl of Glamorgan, whose mission will be described shortly.

Fairfax lost no time in ensuring that royalist hopes of a military recovery

were dashed. His ﬁrst priorities were to relieve Taunton and defeat Goring.

He drove his men hard; between Marlborough and Dorchester, for instance,

they marched an average of seventeen miles a day for ﬁve days on end. At

Dorchester he was met on 3 July by the leaders of the Clubmen of Dorset and

Wiltshire, who asked for passes to enable them to carry petitions to both king

and parliament, calling for a cessation of hostilities and the handing over of

all the places in Dorset that were garrisoned by either side to the Clubmen

themselves. Fairfax naturally refused their request, though with courtesy and

reasoned argument. Their numbers made them formidable, but their attitude

thereafter softened as they came to appreciate his genuine consideration for

local interests and the growing contrast between his army’s respect for law

and property and the habitual marauding of the western royalists.

Fairfax had no difﬁculty in making Goring give up the siege of Taunton,

but experienced rather more in bringing him to battle on advantageous terms.

His ranks were thinned by the casualties at Naseby, where many more had

been wounded than killed, by the escort that he had had to provide for the

4,500 prisoners, and by the chronic drain of desertions. By way of reinforce-

ment he called in Massey and his Western Association forces, which brought

his strength up to about 14,000. Goring with about half that number was also

counting on reinforcements, in his case from south Wales, and was avoiding

battle until they arrived. He sent off a small force in a clever feint which

deceived Fairfax into thinking that he was about to reinvest Taunton, and led

320 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, IV, 168–9; Carlton prints the letter in Charles I,

p. 288.

Quoted, along with Rupert’s advice, in Carlton, Charles I, p. 290.

ch10.y8 27/9/02 11:11 AM Page 320

him to detach Massey with about 4,000 men to prevent it. This meant that

when Goring at last had to face Fairfax on 10 July, after manoeuvres that

showed his tactical sense to be undimmed, he had been able to select a strong

defensive position at Langport, and was much less heavily outnumbered than

he had been a few days earlier. But Fairfax attacked with boldness and skill,

making good use of his artillery and precisely co-ordinating the deployment

of his cavalry and infantry. Success hung upon a cavalry charge which had to

negotiate a line wide enough for only four troopers to ride abreast before they

engaged the waiting royalist horse, and it was executed with proud courage

by units which had ridden under Cromwell before the New Model existed. By

this time Goring’s men could not match their spirit; they ﬂed, and Cromwell

reckoned that they lost 2,000 killed or captured. So many others, scenting

defeat, just melted away that Goring’s army ceased to exist as a ﬁghting force,

though he himself escaped westward.

Twelve days later Fairfax stormed the important garrison town of Bridg-

water, and he took Bath soon afterwards. These successes made Charles and

Rupert abandon their tentative plans for a new campaign in the West Coun-

try, with Bristol as their base. Their position in south Wales was endangered

by a combined operation by Vice-Admiral Batten and Major-General Laugh-

arne, who routed the local royalist forces at Colby Moor (near Haverford-

west) on 1 August. A few days later Fairfax laid siege to Sherborne Castle,

which had a large garrison, and took it by assault on the 14th. By then

Charles, who had been in Cardiff, was already on his way northward, for he

had felt the trap closing upon him. Leaving Rupert with what he thought a

sufﬁcient force to defend Bristol, he set off with the idea of making a junction

with Montrose. After his triumph at Auldearn Montrose had won another

brilliant and bloody victory over Baillie and the Covenanters at Alford on

2 July, and was advancing upon Glasgow. Baillie was now longing to be

relieved of his command, for he was let down by his troops, ill supported, and

distrusted by his masters in Edinburgh, and shadowed by an interfering com-

mittee of estates. When he again faced Montrose, eleven miles from Glasgow

at Kilsyth on 15 August, the committee of estates overruled his choice of

ground and plan of battle, and his army of 6,000 was utterly routed; only a

few hundred escaped with their lives. Montrose, with his own forces now

grown to at least 4,400 foot and 500 horse, entered Glasgow soon after-

wards, and for a brief while he was master of Scotland.

By then Charles had got as far as Doncaster on his way to meet him, but

there he learnt that Leven and his army was on his tracks and only ten miles

away. Leven had been besieging Hereford, but had broken off the operation

to hunt larger prey. Poyntz’s Northern Association forces were also threaten-

ing Charles’s little army, if it can be so called, so in search of safety he took it

on a long and exhausting march by way of Newark and Huntingdon before

Towards a Resolution 321

ch10.y8 27/9/02 11:11 AM Page 321

returning to Oxford, and thence to Worcester. By now his main concern was

to save Bristol, though Rupert had assured him that it could hold out for at

least four months. That proved to be a serious error of judgement.

Fairfax had had Bristol in his sights ever since Naseby. He overruled the

cautious spirits in his council of war who advised him ﬁrst to clear the far

south-west, where Grenville, Goring, and Hopton among others were still

under arms, but he did think it important to reduce the nearer royalist

garrisons in Dorset and Somerset, as we have seen. One reason was that they

were in league with some of the local Clubmen, who were numerous enough

to hamper his operations. There were two distinct associations of Clubmen in

the region. One, centred on the chalk downs of Dorset and neighbouring

Wiltshire (predominantly arable country), had a markedly royalist bias.

While Fairfax was besieging Sherborne its members had been in touch with

the defenders and had agreed to try to force him to raise the siege. He frus-

trated their plan by surprising a meeting of their leaders at Shaftesbury and

sending them up to London as prisoners, whereupon 2,000 or more of their

associates assembled in arms on Hambledon Hill nearby, demanding their

release. Three times Cromwell sent a party of horse to command them to dis-

perse, and each time his men were ﬁred on; some indeed were taken prisoner,

and according to Cromwell ‘used most barbarously’. Two of their most

pugnacious leaders were Anglican clergymen. In the end it took a minor cav-

alry action to break them up, and though fewer than a dozen were killed,

many more were wounded and about 300 captured. Cromwell kept them

overnight in a church, took their names, warned them that they would be

hanged if they were caught again opposing the parliament’s forces, and then

let them go.

The other Clubmen association with which Fairfax dealt was drawn from

the woodland and pastoral areas of Somerset and Gloucestershire, where a

rural clothing industry ﬂourished, and it was much more sympathetic to par-

liament. It quietly co-operated with Fairfax in his siege of Bridgwater, and

when operations began against Bristol the Somerset Clubmen allowed him to

recruit 2,000 auxiliaries from their ranks. Gloucestershire furnished a further

1,500, and both counties readily raised more volunteers as the siege

progressed.

Fairfax completed the investment of Bristol on 23 August, and despite its

formidable fortiﬁcations he did not intend to conduct a long siege. Yet the

alternative of storming the city was a daunting one, and Rupert’s assurance

to the king that he could hold out for four months shows that he anticipated

no such exploit. Success depended on the new courage of the infantry, for

322 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

Abbott, Writings and Speechesof Oliver Cromwell, I, 368–9.

Underdown, Somerset in the Civil War and Interregnum, pp. 98–100, 105–8, 111–18;

Gentles, New Model Army, pp. 61–6.

ch10.y8 27/9/02 11:11 AM Page 322

until a breach was made or a gate forced open cavalry could be of little help.

For foot soldiers, a pitched battle at push of pike was a severe enough test of

morale, but to scale high walls under ﬁre from cannon and muskets, and with

defenders waiting to club or run through the assailants as they came over the

top, must have been quite terrifying. Yet Fairfax sent his men in at 1 a.m. on

10 September, even though six days of bombardment had failed to make a

breach in the walls, and the New Model foot that had fallen back before infer-

ior numbers at Naseby fought heroically. Their task was the harder because

at most points of attack their scaling ladders were too short to reach the

tops of the walls. Yet they forced their way in, and their sheer numbers told in

the end. Fairfax had not far short of 10,000 men, including cavalry, backed

by nearly 5,000 auxiliaries. There was plague in the city, and sickness and

desertion had left Rupert with at most 2,000 regular troops and 1,000 trained

bands and auxiliaries to man a perimeter three or four miles long.

The

ﬁghting raged for six hours, but when resistance became hopeless Rupert

was offered honourable terms, and with the full support of his council of

war he accepted them. His men were allowed to march out with their

swords, though not their ﬁrearms, and were given safe conduct to Oxford.

Fairfax and Cromwell personally escorted him on the ﬁrst two miles of his

journey.

Cromwell in his dispatch to the Speaker paid generous tribute to the gal-

lantry of the soldiers which had secured this great victory. He testiﬁed (in a

passage already quoted in part) that men of different religious professions

had fought together as comrades, ﬁred by the same spirit of faith and prayer,

and he ended with an eloquent plea that they and ‘the people of God all Eng-

land over’ should enjoy liberty of conscience. With obvious reference to the

sterile pursuit of religious uniformity then in progress, he urged that the real

unity was inward and spiritual, ‘and from brethren, in things of the mind,

we look for no compulsion but that of light and reason’.

The Commons

deleted the whole paragraph when they published his letter, as they had done

with the similar plea in his Naseby dispatch, but his Independent supporters

had it printed separately and scattered in the streets. It probably received

more public attention in the end because of the shabby attempt to suppress it.

No previous defeat so shocked and grieved the king as the surrender of

Bristol. He saw it as a betrayal; he immediately dismissed his nephew from the

command of his army, rebuking him in a curt letter for ‘so mean an action’

Towards a Resolution 323

The mayor of Bristol told Cromwell that Rupert had about 1,000 horse and 2,500 foot,

besides 1,200 or more trained bands and auxiliaries, but Rupert’s own narrative states that

though his garrison was nominally 2,300 strong, he could never man the line with more than

1,500 regular soldiers, and that the trained bands and auxiliaries were down to 800: Abbott,

Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, I, 377; Warburton, Memoirs of Prince Rupert, III,

166–7.

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, I, 377.

ch10.y8 27/9/02 11:11 AM Page 323

and directing him to seek his subsistence overseas. This was grossly unjust.

Rupert could fairly be faulted for misleading Charles about his power to hold

out, but not for seeking terms when an immensely superior enemy had forced

its way into the city and had its defenders and inhabitants at mercy. If he had

cared nothing for civilian casualties or for the lives of his own men he might

conceivably have withdrawn into the fort for a do-or-die stand, but his own

ofﬁcers judged it untenable, and the only possible justiﬁcation would have

been that the king or Goring or both could have brought him swift and

powerful relief. But Charles was in Raglan and in no position to help him, and

Goring was still in Exeter; Fairfax intercepted a letter from him saying that he

could not get to Bristol for three weeks.

Further disasters followed fast. Three days after Bristol fell, Montrose suf-

fered a crushing defeat, and as it proved a decisive one, at Philiphaugh. David

Leslie had a large superiority in cavalry and was reinforced by seasoned

troops from Leven’s army in England. Sheer hatred of the plundering High-

landers and Irishmen made the winners dishonour their victory. After about

250 Irish foot had been killed in action the remaining 50 or so laid down their

arms on promise of quarter. Most of them were then shot, and about 300 sol-

diers’ wives, with their children, were butchered on the ﬁeld. The execution

of some of Montrose’s senior ofﬁcers followed later; indeed two Irish ofﬁcers

were put to death without trial. The treatment of the Irish as sub-human was

a vice common to English and Scots, and in this case it had the full blessing of

the Scottish parliament. Montrose himself made his escape, but his hopes of

doing the king further service were vitiated by the mutual enmity and jealousy

between Huntly and the Gordons and himself.

Not knowing of his champion’s defeat, Charles set out from Raglan on

18 September and made for Chester, hoping once more to join forces with

him. The city was under siege but open from the south, and he still had

Langdale’s northern horse to screen him. But on 24 September, the day after

he slipped into Chester, Langdale and some of the garrison forces were

thoroughly defeated by Poyntz’s northerners and some of the besieging army.

Charles was forced on his travels again, with little more than a bodyguard by

now, and he found refuge in Newark on 4 October. By then garrison after

garrison had fallen to detachments of the New Model, Devizes, Laycock

House, and Berkeley Castle all surrendering within four days.

Meanwhile Rupert was so desperate to clear himself that he and Maurice

skirmished their way to Newark, defying the king’s orders not to enter the

city. Charles refused to see him, but Rupert obtained a hearing before mem-

bers of the royal council of war, sitting as a court martial. They cleared him

of any lack of courage or ﬁdelity, but found him guilty of ‘indiscretion’ in sur-

rendering Bristol prematurely. The order to leave the country was not

enforced and eventually a sort of reconciliation was effected; Rupert ended

324 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

ch10.y8 27/9/02 11:11 AM Page 324

the war in Oxford, though without a commission.

The contrast between

Charles’s severity towards his best commander and his indulgence towards

Goring, whom he is not known to have reproached for persistently failing

him in his need, makes sad reading.

During October Cromwell bombarded Winchester Castle into surrender

on the 5th and then moved against Basing House, the strongly fortiﬁed man-

sion of the catholic Marquis of Winchester and a centre of heroic resistance.

It had already withstood two sieges, the second lasting three months, but this

one lasted only six days before Cromwell’s siege guns blew two large breaches

in its walls. The marquis, however, refused his summons to surrender, so

he had to storm it. He did so with little loss, but the defenders fought almost

to the last, and he let his men slaughter many of them, including six priests,

before granting quarter to the majority. Since terms had been refused after

essential defences had been breached they were not entitled to quarter, and a

case could be made for punishing desperate resistance as an example, for the

sake of saving soldiers’ lives and shortening the war. Nevertheless it can hard-

ly be doubted that Cromwell’s uncharacteristic harshness sprang partly from

Basing’s notoriety as ‘a nest of idolatrous papists’. The sack of the house was

comprehensive, and its inmates, ladies included, were stripped of their clothes

by the soldiers. One who got away, wrapped only in a blanket, was Inigo

Jones.

While Cromwell was mopping up the royalist strongholds in Hampshire

and Wiltshire, Fairfax was embarking on the reconquest of the south-west.

He took Tiverton after storming its castle on 19 October, but his campaign

petered out because an increasingly wet autumn made the roads impassable

for his guns and baggage train. There was much sickness in his cold and hun-

gry army, and he was far from well himself. He suffered from kidney stones,

rheumatism, and (so he wrote to his father) ‘a benumbing coldness in my head

and arms, especially on that side I had any hurts’;

he had been wounded four

times before he became Lord General. Cromwell and his part of the army

rejoined him late in October, having taken the surrender of Langford House

on the way. He gave its small garrison honourable terms, and when six of his

soldiers tried to rob its ofﬁcers they were court-martialled. Since they had

done the same in Winchester their sentence was severe: they were made to

draw lots for their lives, the loser was hanged, and the others were sent off to

the governor of Oxford to deal with as he thought ﬁt. He repaid the courtesy

by setting them free. The contrast with the treatment of the Basing House

Towards a Resolution 325

Warburton, Memoirs of Prince Rupert, III, 162; Clarendon, History of the Rebellion,

IV, 93.

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, I, 385–7; Gardiner, Great Civil War,

II, 344–7.

Quoted in John Wilson, Fairfax (1985), pp. 86–7; cf. p. 55.

ch10.y8 27/9/02 11:11 AM Page 325

garrison needs no underlining; it paid to surrender. The reunited army spent

the rest of the year in widely scattered winter quarters in Devon. It no longer

had to reckon with Goring, who took ship for France late in November. Hop-

ton, whom he had supplanted as commander-in-chief of the king’s western

forces by his intrigues, had the thankless task of taking over the demoralized

remnants of his army.

At Newark Charles was having to bear not only bad news from all sides but

troubles at his own court. They were partly of his own making, for he had dis-

missed Will Legge, the governor of Oxford, for no better reason than that he

was Rupert’s friend and Digby wanted him out of the way. Now he did the

same to Sir Richard Willys, the governor of Newark and commander of its

large garrison. This led to a disgraceful scene in which Rupert, Maurice,

Willys, Lord Gerrard, and a dozen or more of their friends burst unbidden

into the king’s presence and demanded an explanation. Willys may have

remembered his treatment when he betrayed the secrets of the Sealed Knot

years later. Such quarrels did nothing to improve Charles’s authority, but the

passions simmered down, and on 5 November he returned to Oxford to face

a cheerless winter.

After cashiering Rupert he had appointed his archenemy Digby as

Lieutenant-General of all his forces north of Trent, and then in mid-October

sent him with about 1,500 men, including what was left of Langdale’s northern

horse, to try and make a junction with Montrose on the Scottish border. In a

rare and brief moment of co-operation in the king’s cause, Huntly’s son

Aboyne had lately come in to Montrose with 1,500 foot and 300 horse. Two

days out of Newark Digby surprised the infantry of Poyntz’s northern army

at Sherburne in Yorkshire and captured most of it, but in an ensuing cavalry

action a lack of understanding between him and Langdale turned victory into

defeat, and they and their disorganized horsemen ﬂed all the way to Skipton

Castle. Thence they resumed a circuitous journey northward, and though

their cavalry took another beating from the Scottish forces based on Carlisle

they pressed on as far as Dumfries. The news they were given there—largely

false, as it turned out—about Montrose and the forces opposed to him was so

discouraging that they hastened back to England. Their few remaining troops

melted away in the Cumbrian fells, and with a small group of ofﬁcers they

were glad to ﬁnd a little boat in Ravenglass to take them to the Isle of

Man. Thence Digby sailed to Ireland, where he busied himself with a plan to

bring over the Prince of Wales and make the country a base for a royalist

resurgence.

Charles’s own thoughts were turning more and more towards Ireland.

There had been something of a stalemate there for a year or two on both the

military and the political fronts, though since April 1644 Colonel Robert

Monro, an experienced professional soldier, had been in command of both

326 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

ch10.y8 27/9/02 11:11 AM Page 326

the Scottish and the parliamentarian forces in Ulster. Charles had received

only limited beneﬁt from the 1643 Cessation, and the longstanding negoti-

ations between Ormond, his faithful Lord Lieutenant, and the Confederates for

help from the Irish themselves were almost deadlocked. Ormond was bent on

keeping Charles’s powers as King of Ireland intact, whereas the Confederates

were interested in assisting him only if he would grant them religious freedom

and conﬁrm at least some of the political gains that they had won by rebellion.

Early in 1645 Charles commissioned his friend Edward Somerset, Earl of

Glamorgan, Worcester’s son and like him a devout catholic, to go to Ireland

on his behalf. Glamorgan’s ofﬁcial instructions were to assist Ormond, but

unknown to the Lord Lieutenant he had a private mandate to negotiate with

the Confederates for an Irish army. A shipwreck and other difﬁculties delayed

his arrival in Ireland until late in June, by which time the king’s almost

desperate plight led him to interpret his brief very liberally. He did not,

however, deal directly with the General Assembly in Kilkenny but with the

Confederate delegates who were treating with Ormond in Dublin. On

25 August he concluded an agreement with them whereby in return for an

army of 10,000 Irishmen he conceded on the king’s behalf not only the repeal

of the anti-catholic penal laws but public catholic worship in all the churches

in Confederate-held territory. Furthermore Irish catholics were to be subject

to no ecclesiastical jurisdiction but that of their own clergy. But the agreement

was to be kept secret until this Irish army was on English soil, and Glamorgan

insisted on signing a ‘defeasance’ which he hoped would give him a let-out if

the king would not consent to the concessions he had made. It was a tortuous

business, and Glamorgan probably went beyond his instructions, but having

been briefed to negotiate behind the Lord Lieutenant’s back he may well have

been unsure how far his discretion stretched. The extent of Charles’s double-

dealing is further revealed by his readiness later in the summer to receive a

special envoy from Mazarin named Jean de Montreuil, whose mission was to

broker a rapprochement between the king and the Scottish Covenanters.

Glamorgan’s treaty never stood much chance of being implemented, and it

was doomed by the end of the year. In October the pope sent Giovanni

Battista Rinuccini, Archbishop of Fermo, to Ireland as his nuncio. Rinuccini was

a thoroughgoing ultramontane, and his overriding aims were to restore pub-

lic catholic worship and the power of the catholic church in Ireland. He called

Glamorgan to Kilkenny for discussions, and reached an agreement with him

on 20 December which added further concessions to those of the August

treaty. The church was to regain most of its lands, catholic bishops were to sit

in the Irish House of Lords, and the next Lord Lieutenant was to be a catholic.

Rinuccini’s position was strengthened by two letters that Charles had written

in his own hand on 20 October to the pope and the cardinal secretary of state,

expressing his full conﬁdence in Glamorgan and promising to ratify any

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