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By Root 1086 0

Two weeks of haggling produced a settlement at £400,000, half to be paid before they left and the rest to be paid in instalments thereafter. The security for the loans raised in the City was the sale of bishops” lands and the excise. The quid pro quo was that the English parliament claimed power over the King’s person and this became the deal – payment of reparations to the Covenanters in return for control of the King. The details were worked out by the end of December: this was the context of Charles’s second plea to come to London and be heard (‘the which if refused to a subject by a King, he would be thought a tyrant for it’). Parliament again felt unmoved by the attractions of this plan and it was decided to hold the King at Holmby, Northamptonshire. The alternative had been Newmarket – a favourite royal stamping ground before the war but in the now-Presbyterian Eastern Association. In January the Committee of Both Kingdoms was superseded as the crucial political body by the Committee for Irish Affairs at Derby House. Payments to the Covenanters began and at the end of January parliamentary commissioners arrived in Newcastle to take the King south. The Covenanters marched north on 30 January, having received the first £100,000, and the second instalment arrived a few days later: to many royalists then and since this has looked rather like the Scots selling their king. Charles himself embellished the story by noting that it was ‘at too cheap a rate’.23

A fixed point in these negotiations was the centrality of the King to any settlement. The surrender of Charles had not settled much and had clearly not ruled out the possibility of renewed fighting. The idea of deposition, or of some kind of ‘temporary abdication’, was in the air, but this was plainly hampered by the fact that none of the alternative claimants to the throne was willing to deal with Parliament. The heir, in fact, had prudently been sent abroad. Martyrdom was in any case preferable for Charles, as he was keen to let everyone know.24 The military defeat of the King was by no means a political defeat for monarchy since there was every prospect of a dissolution of the parliamentary coalition. Prevarication worked in his favour because of this essential fact, which reflected the cultural prestige of monarchy. Charles I and his policies were in general less popular than the idea of monarchy, and he was at his most effective when he presented himself as the embodiment of the latter. From 1647 onwards he increasingly presented himself as such, and as a monarch suffering in the service of that sacred office. In a way he was preparing himself for the martyrdom which he did indeed ultimately embrace – it was certainly a turn away from the austere image of a distant figure, seeking the welfare but not the approval of his people, that had been presented by Van Dyke in the 1630s.

En route from Newcastle to Holmby, Charles was greeted by enthusiastic crowds, which provide vivid testimony to the continuing cultural power not just of the idea of monarchy, but even the appeal of this particular monarch. Many of those who attended hoped to be healed by the royal touch. At Ripon on 7 February he touched for the King’s Evil.25 The King’s Evil was scrofula, a tubercular infection which manifested itself in swellings in the neck and in skin conditions. It was claimed that by his sacred touch an English king could cure this disease, and there is plenty of contemporary testimony that it worked. Richard Wiseman, the royalist surgeon, devoted a whole book of his Chirurgicall Treatises to medical treatments of the disease but noted in advance that the royal touch was the most effective cure, as testified in ‘our chronicles’ and by ‘the personal experiences of many thousands now living’.26 Given the symbolic force of the royal touch, and his own immediate interests, Wiseman could hardly have been expected to say anything else, of course. His book was dedicated ‘To the most sacred majesty of Charles II’: the royal touch was a crucial demonstration of that sacred majesty which attached