Charles I: The Court at War

well as you and as you know this year my talks about the architecture of disruption this is about what happens when through either choice or catastrophe a monarch can't rule or live in the buildings or palaces that were designed for his life and rule and in my last lecture I described how James the first actually deliberately subvert 'add English courtly conventions and established a series of extremely unusual royal residences that gave him privacy and freedom from conventional English royal etiquette I introduced you into this rather amazing reconstruction of Royston palace which isn't just this building here in the middle of Royston the palace was this entire block of buildings in the centre of the town and from our perspective it's very hard to regard Royston as a palace at all it looks just like a jumble of houses in market town well today we're going to turn our attention to King Charles the first and in a completely different way from his father he too ended up living in places which we would hesitate to call palaces but the difference was between him and his father that unlike James the first Charles strove at every turn to maintain the magnificence and dignity due to him as a sovereign well on the 22nd of August 1642 Charles the first raised his royal standard at Nottingham signaling the end of a standoff with Parliament and the beginning of what we know as the civil war since the 10th of January that year when Charles had abandoned London after his botched attempt to arrest the five members of parliament he'd been on the move he had hastily exited from Whitehall and he arrived late at night at Hampton Court which was completely unprepared to receive the royal family it was cold and only partially furnished when Charles entered his privy lodgings but the King's concern that that night was not comfort it was security and preparations were undertaken at lightning speed for the king and queen to move to the safety of Windsor Castle and it was noted at the time that night quote things are done in such post haste that I have never heard of the like for the voyage of persons of so great a dignity these hurried moves to Hampton Court and Windsor were the first spontaneous moves of hundreds that the king was to make over the next five years before he eventually returned dissent James's Palace a prisoner in January 1649 the court normally planned its itinerary months in advance to allow houses to be furnished and repaired and larders and cellars to be stocked in preparation but at war Charles and his family often stayed in makeshift accommodation the king sleeping under a hedge at loss with eel in Cornwall and in the back of his coach at Wolvercote in Oxfordshire determined to protect his privilege and his pride and finding the process of negotiation with his opponents frustrating and baffling in equal measure Charles seemed almost to enjoy being in the field the queen henrietta maria more focused more motivated and it should be said more angry than her husband apparently relished the situation in which she found herself well the first great battle of the Civil War was fought at Edgehill 10 miles northwest of Banbury and in its aftermath it was natural that the court and the army should move to Oxford the university was fervently loyal to the crown and the city which of course is in the crook of Three Rivers was actually very easily defensible the king was greeted outside Oxford by the vice-chancellor of the University who was assured by the king that he would only remain in the city until and I quote we can with safety to our honour and person in peace returned to the Jerusalem of our nation our city of London thus for three and a half years Oxford became the seat of the court the headquarters of the army in effect the royalist capital city but it was also a garrison town a fact demonstrated by the appointment of Jacob Lord Ashley as its military governor and a board of civilian Lord commissioners the governor and the Lord commissioners had to liaise with the mayor and aldermen on one hand and the vice-chancellor and the heads of the colleges on the other governing Oxford while it was the royalist Capitol was complex and fraught even more complex and fraught than it is today the King made his headquarters at Christchurch now what I'm showing you here is not Christ Church College as you have ever seen it this is a reconstruction of Christchurch as it was perhaps intended to be when Cardinal Wolsey founded it in 1525 this is a reconstruction by my former colleague Daphne Ford what Wolsey did was cannibalized the site of the medieval Priory of Sant fries wide and converted the site into what was intended to be the largest College in Oxford or Cambridge and you can see the vast great cloister flanked to the north and south by a great hall and by an enormous Chapel that was never built the scheme of course was in RuPt it by his death in 1530 and although the Hall arguably the most magnificent in Oxford was completed this great cloistered quad here was only built on three sides the rest was not uncompleted and instead of this Chapel being constructed the Priory Church became the College Chapel but not for long the Episcopal reorganization that took place after the Reformation so a new diocese being formed in Oxford and the chapel became a Christchurch Cathedral with its own Dean and chapter now this combined arrangement of college and Cathedral was unique but what made it even more unusual were provisions in cardinal wolsey x' founding statutes of the college which specified that it should be used by the monarch by his eldest son and their households whenever they liked now where exactly Woolsey intended the Royal lodgings the Royal Palace if you like within christ church college to be is uncertain the obvious place would have been at the high end here of the Great Hall and in this great tower here that was built on the corner but when in 1566 Elizabeth the first exercised her right to stay at the College she stayed in the Deanery which occupied the north end of this range here and it was also here that Charles the first stayed in 1636 when he was the guest of William Lord the Archbishop of Canterbury now Lord who we could say a lot about this evening but we're only going to mention briefly had begun his career as a royal chaplain and through the patronage of the Duke of Buckingham had risen by 1633 not only to be Archbishop of Canterbury but to be Dean at the Chapel Royal a privy councillor and Chancellor of Oxford University and at Oxford he had built a magnificent new quadrangle at his former college st. John's and in 1636 when Charles the first came to Oxford he came to see and to celebrate the opening of this magnificent new courtyard now visits by Stuart Kings and the expectation of more visits drew attention to the facts that in complete Christchurch had all the prestige of a royal foundation but none of the expected architectural magnificence and this want was absolutely highlighted by this spectacular new courtyard at San John's with its bronze statue in the middle here of Charles the first by Hubert lesser and in fact also at the other side there was a statue of Henrietta Maria and so at Christchurch successive demes Thomas dooper and his successor Samuel fel who you see here who were both both fervent Royalists set out to complete Cardinal Wolsey unfinished works because this is what Christchurch look like in 1636 when Charles the first came to the opening of some John's College and you can see three sides of the courtyard were completed not the forth here are the foundations of Woolsey's Chapel not erected and here is what is now Christchurch Cathedral which was at the College Chapel and also the Cathedral of the diocese so what these Dean's do Mel wanted to do was complete this side here of the courtyard but in fact the only thing they managed to do before the outbreak of the civil war was a complete this incredible staircase just go back here this is the Great Hall this is a tower here in which they built this magnificent staircase leading up to the Great Hall one of the largest if not the largest the pan vault ever to be built in England and so when Charles the first arrived in Oxford to make it his royal capital in October 1642 the arrival of the court in one sense wasn't particularly unusual on progress the court frequently established itself in towns and cities and because of this special status that Christchurch college had the Kings arrival there was a bit like entering one of the many royal progress houses maintained by the crown yet there was a difference the royal family very rarely moved together and when the Queen eventually joined the king in Oxford that would be extremely unusually for royal households in the city in total including those of course of the two princes Charles and James in addition to four royal households there was the army and its officers and then increasing numbers of officers of state who because of the war quite a lot of them brought their families their wives and their children with them the court always had followers but in Oxford it became a magnet for the dispossessed the pen Eurus or the simply frightened Royalists of all classes and to make matters even worse for every man of any status there was at least one horse and the requirements of stabling became absolutely mence so there were three authorities who were charged with finding lodgings at Oxford for those with official duties there was the quartermaster of the army who was requisitioning lodgings for soldiers during the Royal harbingers who were billeting members of the royal household and then there was the governor of the city who was housing the garrison and everybody else just had to scramble madly and try and find a place to stay in order to ease the pressure the king issued a series of proclamations ordering people who had no official reason to be in the city to get out householders were actually paid an allowance of three shillings and sixpence a week for feeding a soldier and the colleges charged their guests for board and lodging in exactly the same way they would have charged the students who incidentally had all been sent home by the king in order to vacate the colleges for the royal households private owners could exchange a little pieces of paper called billets which were accommodation notices issued by the harbingers for for cash but the pressure on accommodation in the city was acute this is an Lady Fanshawe she was summoned by her father to join the court at Oxford in 1643 her father Sir John Harrison was a die-hard royalist and he'd had his estates sequestered by Parliament and by the time he reached Oxford he was in Anne's words as poor as job she wrote in her autobiography and I quote that from as good house as any gentleman of England we had come to a Baker's house in an obscure street and from rooms well furnished to Lyon - a very bad bed in a garret she describes the play and sickness by reason of so many people being packed together as I believe there never was before of that quality but most she claimed bore it with Marta like cheerfulness so the king moved directly into the deans lodgings christchurch now this is David Logan's view of Christchurch a bit later after the court chart had been completed in 42 it was still the u-shape and the king moves into the lodgings just here and you can see the lodgings again and remember the other of David Logan's views it's this range here that the king is set up in and a photograph from the garden ignore this bit here which is added on later the King's living in this block of rooms here on the first floor he had the usual arrangement of a presence chamber like a sort of throne chamber a privy chamber private chamber and it would drawings chamber and there were a private back stairs for him and his gentleman of the bedchamber leading up to the withdrawing chamber the Privy Council met in the chapter house of the Cathedral and the council of war met in the college's audit house the which was the old infirmary of the Priory the Royal lodgings were furnished with royal tapestries textiles plates and other furniture from the Royal wardrobe and the King clearly was carrying around the countryside with him up until 1642 a huge baggage train because when his train was eventually captured at the Battle of Naseby it contained 200 wagons and this is 200 wagons of household goods coin and of course famously after the Battle of Naseby including all the king's personal correspondence now although archbishop Lord had characterized Christchurch as having many fair lodgings for great men there wasn't actually enough space to accommodate either all the offices or officers of state in the college let alone the wider royal household and so luckily contiguous with christchurch with two other colleges so here we have here we have christchurch with the u-shape this is this is what it was like in 1642 but you have corpus christi college here and you have Merton college here you also have Oriel College here so these three colleges are actually contiguous you don't need to go over a road to get to them and you also have Oriole which you just have to go over a little lane to get close to and so all three of these colleges Christchurch corpus and Merton were all crunched together into a sort of single big royal palace so after henrietta maria joined the king in oxford in 1643 she was giving lodgings here at Merton and here is Merton College now the king and queen knew this College they had been here in 1629 and they had been feasted by the warden sir Nathaniel Brent but brent had elected to side with Parliament and so he had been elected ejected from his lodgings which was sited here in and above this gateway and Henrietta Maria moved into them so she moved into these lodgings here and her household moved into this quadrangle and this quadrangle was a brand new quadrangle it was only completed in 1610 the most modern one in Oxford in fact and on this great tower here there were the arms of James the first so they must have felt very comfortable and very at home in order to link Merton and Christchurch war um holes were bashed in the walls between the colleges and gates were put in and the path was laid across the colleges through the gardens the king and the queen could get between them so at Corpus Christi here lodged John Ashe Burnham treasurer and paymaster to the army and we know that the king and the princes frequently visited him at Corpus Christi college because in the Bursar's accounts we can see that tips were given to the royal trumpeters and the royal footman the Provost of oriole which had indicated where that was a moment ago was John Tolson he was another fervent royalist who actually became Vice Chancellor of the University in 1642 and played a major role in the fortification of the city Oriol was home to the Lord treasurer Francis Cottingham and also to the Dean of the Chapel Royal and 35 other royal servants and army officers Cottington chaired meetings of the Executive Committee of the Privy Council in the college but perhaps the most important role of Oriel College was as the editorial office for McCurry Asst Alec Asst or the court mercury which was the royalists newspaper published in Oxford from 1643 to 1645 which was the mouthpiece of the royalist cause so the sort of propaganda hub was established at at Oriel College right in the heart of this sort of royal enclaves now although what I have just described to you at Christchurch corpus and Merton might seem like a rather elegant and charming actually rather an agreeable royal enclaved we have to remember that it was also a war zone Oxford was a walled city and the medieval defences were supplemented by a series of bastions and gun emplacements what you see here is a plan of Oxford drawn up in the early 40s 42 43 by Bernard dadgum who you see there who later on became Charles the seconds chief military engineer you can see the city here the walled city in the city walls but what you can see most importantly are these defensive out works these rival ins and bastions all the way around at the city of Oxford which were the defense's erected by the Royalists effectively using slave labor the students who remained foolishly were required to build these bastions and members of the town also but what you'll notice on here is bernadtom only identifies two buildings by name Oxford castle here and Christchurch and there is Christchurch and here is the location of Corpus Christi and here is the location of Merton and you can see that in front of these colleges were these particularly large bastions big gun bastions and here in Christchurch meadows and for those of you who know Oxford know these beautiful meadows here which were deliberately flooded by damming the rivers here so as you were sitting in these colleges in 42 43 and right up to 46 actually you were looking over these fortified walls with huge cannons looking out over the flooded water meadows and to protect the city from the Parliamentarians and when you look more closely at what's happening within the city and here's a little plan that I've just done just to show where everything was you'll see that actually the whole city was geared towards towards war the there was a magazine at new college the artillery was parked at a maudlin college grove there was a cannon foundry in the middle of Christ Church in the school's building there was a factory repairing small arms drawbridges were being mended and manufactured in the school's buildings and also armor and uniforms were restored they're a powder gunpowder was prudently not made in the city but was being milled on the outskirts of the city the town was full of soldiers often short on pay and short on temper the city was over full it was prone to disease squalor fire and dis order so let's not imagine that they were having a cosy time although as I will go on to explain Charles the first did his best now at the gates of Christchurch his crutch of Christchurch wasn't all dates this street here named after the church here sent all dates and this long street here became the street where the bulk of the royal household was accommodated in private street their houses on both sides of the street lodged the Kings surgeon his tailor his barber his apothecary and the Royal SEM stris and all these people held posts that brought them into close contact with the king and this is a brilliant bit of work that somebody did not me and identifying from a survey that was taken where all the royal servants lived there's Christchurch that the gates to Christchurch these are all the royal servants and these are all the places they lived along the street amazing piece of work someone's done 80 of the Kings red-coated life guard of foot were also billeted instant all gates including their colonel who was also the King's at Lord Chamberlain and on the west side have sent all dates here was Pembroke College whose master was another royalist and here resided the Secretary of State Sir Edward Nicholas and 79 other senior Royalists and and household officials these people basically made their home in Oxford many remaining in residence when the army left to campaign in the summer some married many had children and a few died if you look at the burial records of Christchurch Cathedral up here they include entries for an officer of the counting-house the Clarke controller - yeoman of the Wardrobe - garter heralds and the keeper of the Great Seal well soon after establishing himself at Christchurch Charles issued a series of orders for the regulation of access access to his lodgings and these essentially were replicating the court etiquettes that were normally held at Whitehall er Hampton Court or elsewhere he promoted William Seymore here Marquess of hartford to be his groom of the stool this is the most important person in the court a person who looked after the King's personal needs and as well as being the groom of the stool he was made Lord Commissioner of Oxford and Vice Chancellor of the University said the king is bringing together all the important posts in a single person as his closest servant at Christ Church College well when the Queen made her ceremonial entry into Oxford in 1643 'men in her coach and a great sort of parade of people she moved into Merton as I've said and she of course was accompanied by her Catholic priests her confessor and her Catholic attendance was great anxiety amongst the fellows of the college about holding Anglican services in the Merton Chapel while she was in residence but the Queen insisted that the Anglican services continue and she must have heard Mass we her household elsewhere in the college now what we have to remember about the court at Oxford was that the summer was the campaigning season that's when you fought but the court completely retreated to Oxford during the winters so the winters of 1640 two to three forty three to four and forty four to five court life was almost normal the Royal Army officer Sir Henry Slingsby described a day in the Kings routine in 1644 and I quote he kept his hours most exactly both for his exercises and for his dispatches as also his hours for admitting all sorts to come and speak with him you might know where he would be from any hour from his rising which was very early to his walk he took in the garden and so to Chapel and dinner so after dinner if he went not abroad he had his hours for writing or discourses playing or tennis so as before the civil war the King spent much of his leisure time in the Queen's lodgings where he could be free from the restrictive etiquette of his own apartments and it didn't take much detective work to work out that because their youngest child was conceived in Oxford he probably spent the nights there too so the annual round of court ceremonial continued in wintertime more or less uninterrupted the King attended services in the cathedral taking communion in public monday Thursday he distributes the Maundy money he holds a chapter of the Order of the Garter the young John Aubrey recalled often watching the King dining in public in the Great Hall at Christchurch there was no shortage of food for the Royal table and some of the accounts survived showing that the Kings table set up for public dining was groaning with good food and presume visions and here in fact is the Great Hall at Christchurch where the king dined and indeed where he feasted visiting ambassadors to Oxford also came the parliamentary representatives to try and negotiate a settlement with the king and there are various descriptions of them being received in the Royal rooms at christchurch just as if they had been at an audience with the king at Whitehall so this ordered maintenance of Court and state etiquette and the use of state theatre at Christchurch was just as important to Charles the first as was the military effort for Charles to be visibly King and to be afforded due deference was crucial not only to his own dignity but to the dignity of his office which was the thing he was fighting to preserve the oxford court was no ramshackle compromise it was conducted with deliberate dignity and magnificence while the ceremonial side of the King's life was upheld there was no neglect of pleasure Charles hunted with his hounds in his own Park at Woodstock just outside Oxford and in poor weather he played tennis with the Prince of Wales the Duke of York and Prince Rupert there was in fact a tennis court at the back so this is um this is Christchurch this building here so dis building here is a tennis court and there's a wonderful account in November 1643 just think what's going on November 16 43 and he orders his master of the robes to send a servant from London to Oxford to bring a bolt of taffeta two pairs of garters and roses with sink silk buttons to make him a tennis suit although most court musicians stayed in London some came to Oxford and they accompanied services at Christchurch but as well as the musicians came actors to perform plays and masks at court although perhaps without some of the complex scenery that had become commonplace at Whitehall in February 1546 at the sort of nadir of the Kings position in Oxford a play was acted before him and I quote to keep up his spirit instead of good success from his soldiery Sir Anthony Van Dyck had died just as a civil war had begun and the English painter sometime protege of Van Dyck came to Oxford rented a house and set up a painting studio absent John's College and in here were painted Prince Rupert Prince Morris Prince James Prince Charles and as well as the king himself and these amazing pictures by Jobson and I urge you to go and see them in the Portrait Gallery if you've never seen these before totally capture what life must have been like in Oxford in the early 1640s and I love this group portrait of 1645 to 6 showing a meeting between three royalist commanders and in in the royal capital at Oxford in 1643 the king ordered all royal servants should come and join him at Oxford and this was a prelude to an attempt to relocate all the central organs of state from Westminster to Oxford and so the law courts were brought to Oxford the the Chancery the exchange and the Oxford Mint which was set up in a new hall in actually produced huge amounts of coin including one of the most beautiful English coins ever struck and you can see on the obverse this coin here slogans explaining what Charles the first was fighting for he was fighting for the Protestant religion the laws of England and the freedom of parliament liebherr Paul which is extraordinarily and sort of ambiguous statements to us today but what I really want you to look at is this side of the coin and here you see the King on his horse beside a expect and this remarkable coin must have been struck on the King's orders because what he is is doing here is he's showing his pride in Oxford his pride in its buildings the beauty and the history of this city and we know that when he actually had an opportunity in 1645 to move the court to Bristol he resolved to stay in Oxford as it was the only place that could have accommodated the court in comfort and the only place that he thought was suitable to his and the courts magnificence well Henrietta Maria as I've already mentioned and became pregnant she had to leave Oxford it was very unhealthy so she disappears she goes down to the West Country then she gets a ship to the Channel Islands and she ends up in France the King never sees her again and as Oxford is completely encircled by the parliamentary army on the 27th of April 16:46 he rides out of Oxford disguised as a servant accompanied by three attendants and abandoning his capital and abandoning his son the Duke of York on June the 25th the keys of the surrendered City were handed to the parliamentary general general Fairfax who with the other senior parliamentary officers entered the city and made for Christ they're sitting in the Royal presence chamber on the chair of estate in Christchurch College was Prince Jett Prince James the future James the second king of England one by one the parliamentary generals kissed the twelve-year-olds hand only one of their number knelt at the feet of the boy the 12 year old boy as he did so that man was Oliver Cromwell even in the humiliation of defeat the magic of monarchy was alive well I'm not going to go through all the various shenanigans that got Charles the first from Oxford to Hampton Court but that is indeed where he ended up in January 16 47 after a deal with the Scots allowed him to be moved to the sack to the south and so Hampton Court was his resting place for 11 weeks from the 24th of August and what is usually described as Charles's imprisonment at Hampton Court was it was barely house arrest not only did he have free movement about the palace and parks but he retained all his attendants and he essentially held court in miniature maintained by Parliament's official sanction the house was refurnished for his arrival plate was issued from the jewel house at the Tower of London for his table it also seems that Charles requested paintings of his family to be sent from Whitehall to hang on the walls of Hampton Court and they include were pretty sure portraits of Henrietta Maria painted by Van Dyck he then successfully petitioned Parliament for his children to come and visit him and between June and November 1647 they came several times a week talking hunt playing tennis with their father in October that year Charles requested that they should occasionally be allowed to stay overnight a quest and request that was granted Elizabeth came to stay in a bedroom off the privy gallery and she asked that the Kings guards should be moved a little further off as she claimed that their noise kept her awake at night Charles's stay at Hampton Court was remarkably happy Royalists supporters came from London to see him pay their respects also came senior parliamentary officers including Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton with whom the king discussed the so called heads of proposals the draft agreement that was being touted as the best constitutional offer on settlement on offer on the 9th or 10th of October though Cromwell wrote to Colonel Edward Walley Charles's supervisor at Hampton Court warning him that the army might try and assassinate the king wally showed the letter to charles the following night under cover of darkness charles escaped what he had done or myth certainly was slip about the Royal Privy lodgings are over here and this bit sticking out here is the the private stair the Privy stair that led down from the privy lodgings into the gardens and what Charles did was slip out of the staircase through the gardens to the waterside here where there was a boat waiting for him that took him over the water there was there were horses waiting for him on the other side and he galloped off into the night there was no agreed plan of where he was going to go to at least not until they had got past Farnham when the King finally decided that he was going to make for the Isle of Wight now the Isle of Wight was chosen because there was no army units there because of course people to remember the reason he flees from Hampton Court is because he's frightened of being assassinated there's no army unit there but more to the point while he was receiving these various senior and parliamentary officers in state at Hampton Court one of them Colonel Robert Hammond made a good impression of him and Hammond 26 year old army officer was made the governor of the Isle of Wight and the intention was to go to Hammond and ask him whether he was prepared to shelter the king at carisbrooke castle well I think the king was pretty lukewarm about this plan he was placing himself in the hands of a parliamentary army officer who clearly had conflicted loyalties but Charles had very little choice and so he made the short sea crossing across the Solent to the Isle of Wight and on to carisbrooke castle so those of you who know the Isle of Wight his Newport up here and here is Carisbrook you can see the castle right in the middle I mean it's a incredibly strategic position and because it was often regarded as sort of the Gateway to England it was a castle that had long been fortified and last fortified in the 1590s when there was the fear the threat of Spanish invasion as the Spanish Armada and at that point the castle was refortified by its captain Sir George Carey and you can see here here's the medieval castle and these outworks they look a bit like the ones around Oxford don't they very similar these these artillery outworks were put right the way around the castle and in order to protected from Spanish invasion Sir George Kerry who was the captain of the castle and responsible for this refortified was the son of Lord Hunstanton who was the Queen's cousin and he entitled he inherited Lord hun stones titles in 1596 he'd actually been appointed captain of the castle in 1583 and he clearly felt that the sort of medieval lodgings which the constable inherit inhibited here were not really up to scratch and so he built a brand-new large residence here bébé these rooms here for himself in which he lived in some style 13 quite handsome rooms with what were described as a fair pair of large stairs and in fact Charles the first had been fisted in these handsome lodgings when he was Prince of Wales in 1618 but of course the Kings visit in November 16 47 was rather different from his feasting as Prince of Wales in 1618 he moved into these lodgings where he received a number of island dignitaries and he explained and I quote here that my resolution in coming here being but to be secured till there may be some happy accommodation made in other words he basically wanted to be safe until some deal was done by Parliament how long this was going to take nobody knew and so Charles successfully requested that his household servants that he had hurriedly left behind at Hampton Court should be sent to Carisbrook to join him and a large posse of servants arrived at the castle at the end of November with several dozen carts of furnishings including tapestries and furniture and plate and bedding and everything that completely transformed these lodgings here into a handsomely furnished royal palace a month later the royal coach with a liveried coachman and footman were also shipped across the sea and delivered to the castle and at first the king living at Carisbrook was remarkably free to travel round the island in his coach sightseeing and doing a spot of hunting but by the end of the year security was tightened up the king went out much less and after a rather feeble attempt by some local people to rescue him so-called rescue him the excursions round the island per ceased and he was effectively imprisoned what I think is so striking about the King's initial establishment is that he was accommodated in fine rooms richly furnished and attended by a household of some seventy attendants and even after Parliament purged his household of suspect servants there was still 30 servants in the castle they managed to continue a royal life with a considerable degree of formality he ceremoniously dessert and dined in public he went to daily prayers he received visitors he read books that had been sent down from London from the royal library he listened to music he touched people for the Kings evil and after the construction of a bowling green which was specially made for him in the East Bailey that's this is a bowling green here he played bowls regularly and towards the end of the summer a little pavilion was built obviously quite a remarkable building this is that we've got the accounts for it for the Kings shelter it was rather a rainy summer two incidents in particular I think tell us something about the Kings mental state one of the guests brought up from London to see him at Carisbrook was John Webb now John Webb was in ego James's assistant and he had been working with Inigo Jones on an extraordinary project to rebuild Whitehall palace this project had been going on and off during the during the 1530s and astonishingly with Charles the first in captivity at Carisbrooke he called for John Webb and asked him to bring his plans for Whitehall to the castle because he'd got leisure time so he could discuss what they were going to build next and this is what they were going to build next this modest palace here can be characterized by me telling you that this building here is the banqueting house in Whitehall okay so this vast palace was going to cover you know most of the James's Park and the whole of this area across to the river these plans were discussed with the king by John Webb and on the bottom of one of them the King signed it taken which essentially means this is the plan I have agreed and that you will build so that's the first thing that's have characterises mentality the second thing is an order that was given to the loyal royal librarian Patrick young now the Royal Library was established as James's Palace and it was a fantastic library and it not only contained books and manuscripts and drawings it contained other Kings and coin and middle cabinet and a Patrick young received a letter from the king signed at a Carisbrook asking him to consult the antiquary sir Symons dues and ask him to help sort out his coin collection placing the specimens in precise date order and removing any duplicates now of course we ladies and gentlemen have the benefit of hindsight and we kind of realize because we know what happened within five months of these orders being given that they were acts of fantasy on one hand and denial on the other but they sort of encapsulate the whole period I have been speaking about this evening a king focused on his legality focused on the deference that was due to him focused on his rights focused on his prerogatives and um and unable to see that without compromise on his part resolution was impossible to find well after several hopeless attempts at escape from the castle frustrated by a mixture of treachery bad luck and incompetence my favorite one of his escape stories is the one where he tried to get out of his bedroom window that had bars on it he got his head and shoulders out and then he couldn't get the rest of him through and he was stuck half out and half in and had to be pulled back into his lodgings by his boots before he was spotted I mean it was completely hopeless really and as well as these incompetent attempts to escape there were negotiations and these here is a contemporary woodcut showing the king at the negotiations for the so-called Treaty of Newport which was part of the process to try and find an accommodation between the King and Parliament but on November the 30th 1648 to a year's residence he was there for a year at Carisbrook Charles was removed to Hearst Castle on the mainland one step towards London and although nobody at the time appreciated it one step towards the executioner's block well ladies and gentlemen tonight we have seen how in a completely different way to his father Charles the first established his court in complex and unexpected environments these were not out of choice like his father's these were out of circumstance but the king was determined that circumstances would not compromise the deference and order about his person indeed these courts at Oxford and and Carisbrook were as ceremonious as the fixed courts were before the Civil War in my next lecture we're going to be looking at the court of charles ii not though the familiar court after 1660 but his court in exile and consider how British etiquette interacted with architecture in far from ideal circumstances in France and in Holland thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Gresham College

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Rating: 4.7714286 out of 5

Keywords: gresham, gresham college, education, lecture, public, london, debate, academia, knowledge, history, Charles I, the court, civil war, Oxford, english civil war, royal houses, 17th century, 17th century history, Lord Astley, William Laud, Dean Samuel Fell, Lady Fanshawe, Elizabeth Stuart, William Seymour

Id: yBbfSqIYoU8

Length: 54min 53sec (3293 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 06 2019