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By Root 1270 0

and vigorous defender of the Protestant interest.32 The letters reveal a manifestly half-hearted commitment to the Uxbridge negotiations, and a complete unwillingness to give ground on episcopacy and the militia (two issues identified in the preface as core parts of the parliamentary cause from the Nineteen Propositions onwards). Many other letters demonstrate how willing he was to pursue alternative and incompatible policies at the same time as negotiating for peace. Here was vindication for those who had been reluctant to see the Uxbridge treaty go forward. As the City Alarum put it: ‘it hath unlocked the mystery of former treaties, so I hope it will lock up our minds from thoughts of future’.33

Following the transcripts were four pages of annotations which made great play of the influence of Henrietta Maria: ‘the Kings Counsels are wholly managed by the Queen, though she be of the weaker sex, born an alien, bred up in a contrary religion’; her advice had the effect of commands, and the ‘King professes to prefer her health before the exigence and importance of his own public affairs’; and she was ‘as harsh, and imperious towards the King… as she is implacable to our religion, nation, and government’.34 Examples of counsel hostile to English interest illustrated this latter point, such as suggestions for a trade embargo and the dissolution of Parliament. Fears that, like Laud and Strafford, her head might well be on the block were clearly well-founded.

But the King too was guilty, and not just of being under the thumb: ‘in many things’, in fact, he exceeded ‘the Queen for acts of hostility and covering them over with deeper and darker secrecy’.35 There followed a devastating catalogue of his ‘dextrous’ dealings against national interests, the international Protestant cause, English parliaments and religion. ‘The King will declare nothing in favour of his parliament, so long as he can find a party to maintain him in this opposition; nor perform any thing which he hath declared so long as he can find a sufficient party to excuse him from it’.36 This was a longstanding weakness, as a brief history of his reign made clear. Finally the pamphlet compared six important public statements with his private views as revealed by the correspondence. All six were juxtaposed with ‘distinctions’ that might make apparently contradictory statements reconcilable. The presentation of these letters has had a devastating effect on subsequent views of Charles.

Despite the political damage, however, and the ruthlessly effective exploitation of this windfall, there were those who felt that these letters should not have been published. The Kings Cabinet had tried to forestall objections. Enemies to ‘parliaments and reformation… made wilful in their enmity’ could be expected to ‘deny these papers to have been written by the King’s own hand, or else that we make just constructions and inferences out of them’. Or deny that, although accurately recorded and interpreted, ‘they are blameable, or unjustifiable against such rebels as we are’. In fact the replies did not contest the authenticity, but rather the construction placed on them or how reprehensible the King had been. ‘The letters are not unworthy [of] a Prince Defender of the Faith, against whom so dangerous and causeless a Rebellion was then in its height, threatening both to his government, and to the Protestant profession of the Christian religion in this Kingdom, an utter ruin’, went one response.37 Another complained that ‘They will not let him loath a rebel, nay, they will not let him love a wife; they will not let him use his sword, nay, they will not let him use his pen, but they will expose him for it’.38 A plausible line of defence was that in order to make peace in such a complex situation, Charles needed to keep his own counsels, and that concessions for that purpose were not only carefully considered, but noble. Suspending punishment of Catholics might be a good deal in order to secure the established church, for example. And why shouldn’t he bring in foreign forces, if his own