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This was a hard battle to win, not least because it required such close attention from readers. The author of A Key To the Kings cabinet, for example, did a clever job of reconciling a secret promise to abrogate the laws against popery with a public declaration to put them into execution: a promise to execute them is not a promise not to repeal them; a promise to abrogate the statutes clearly implies that he will do it with parliamentary consent.39 But really this was in many places very unpromising material for Charles’s defenders.

Others concentrated on the issue of seemliness, however: something at the heart of controversies over publication during the 1640s. As one pamphlet’s response to the speeches at Common Hall put it: ‘Men indeed, whose religion will allow them to ransack God’s cabinet, no marvel, if they quickly find reason not to spare the King’s’.40 Here was the obverse of the revelation of private truths for public purposes – a kind of violation. Bruno Ryves, in his accounts of the spoliation of parliamentary troops, made much mention of the invasion of private spaces, especially ladies” closets.41 The publication of the letters robbed the King of his dignity, something essential to the negotiation of a peace, and in revealing the depth of his dependence on Henrietta Maria they had violated his privacy.42

Reading these responses it is easy to see Charles’s point of view: he was being asked to agree to things that were, in his view, absolutely wrong; and that was a much more serious thing for a king than for one of his subjects. Moreover, he was being pushed into them by armed subjects, unable to recognize their duties to him as the anointed monarch, and to justify himself to all his subjects in a world of printed propaganda. Since these things were unacceptable, and since the war was not going his way, what option did he have but to play for time and seek other sources of support? And, in any case, Parliament routinely prepared for war while negotiating for peace – this was in the nature of the crisis since 1642. Nonetheless, after the revelation of these letters no-one who did a deal with him could be comfortable that it would stick. Their revelation did no favours to the moderates at Westminster, and they immediately scuppered proposals for a peace treaty floated in the Lords, with the support of the Covenanters, in the week after Naseby.43

By any normal standards Naseby was terrible enough: one eyewitness reported that ‘I saw the field so bestrewed with carcasses of horses and men, the bodies lay slain about four miles in length but most thick on the hill where the king stood’.44 It was politically very significant, but not immediately seen as strategically so. Most of the King’s cavalry got away and Goring’s army, by virtue of its absence, was still intact. Two further developments served to turn Naseby into the decisive battle of the war – the triumphant march of the New Model through the West Country and the defeat of Montrose.

Following Naseby, Charles headed for the Welsh hills, arriving at Hereford on 19 June. On the previous day he had renewed his appeal to Ormond for Irish troops and such were his hopes of success that Langdale was made governor of north Wales in preparation for their arrival. On 27 June preparations were made to receive them in Cornwall too. Fairfax followed up the victory at Naseby first by laying siege to Leicester, which surrendered on 18 June. Further moves were made cautiously, given the presence of Goring’s force in the west, and the mustering of the King’s forces in the Marches. But from late June the New Model fought an apparently irresistible campaign in Dorset and Somerset. The siege of Taunton had been lifted on 29 June, probably in fear of Fairfax’s approach.45 But the march to relieve the siege was hampered by a ‘third force’: armed bodies of local people referred to as ‘clubmen’. It was the second significant occasion when the field armies had been confronted in this way: a similar force had severely hampered royalist operations at Hereford