Prince Rupert: 'Welcome to Nobody?'

A version of this article appeared in the latest edition of the journal of the Samuel Pepys Society, but you can read the full text here:

‘Welcome to Nobody’? Prince Rupert and the Politics of Pepys and the Restoration.

“This day or yesterday I hear Prince Robt. Is come to Court; but welcome to nobody” [1]. With this terse, private judgment, written down late on the evening of 29 September 1660, Samuel Pepys succeeded in capturing the general feeling of the English court towards the homeless, “vagabond German”, who had managed to introduce the word ‘plunder’ to the English language, and who had returned to England after an absence of fourteen years spent in exile.

Seemingly an embarrassment to all but his small circle of friends, the prince had already made himself disagreeable to James, Duke of York, on account of his Calvinism. The younger generation of Cavaliers, brutalised by a war that he had fuelled, found to their surprise and amusement that his abstemiousness in matters of drink, tobacco, and promiscuity smacked of the very brand of Puritanism that they had sought to define themselves against. For those former Parliamentarians, such as Pepys’ employer and patron, Ralph Montagu (recently ennobled as the Earl of Sandwich) who had turned their coats in order to effect and gain from the Restoration of the monarchy, it was difficult to forget – let alone to forgive - the prince’s complicity in war crimes committed on English soil; namely, the torching of Birmingham, in 1643, the massacre at Bolton, in 1644, and the sack of Leicester, in 1645 [2]. Though barely 40, he was a figure who seemed have stepped from a past age, curiously ill-starred, dangerous, and divisive [3]. The London footpads sought to cock-a-snoop at him and were bold enough, on several occasions, to steal his hounds from their kennels at Whitehall, while at the other end of the social scale, the Earl of Rochester – acting with impunity as the king’s friend – smashed-up the prince’s laboratory at Windsor and broke his image engraved upon a glass sundial in the gardens at Whitehall [4].

Far more seriously, in regard to the prince’s posthumous reputation, the two great literary sources for the Civil War and Restoration eras – Clarendon and Pepys – were united by their disdain for his arrogance, lack of statecraft, and propensity for violence. Indeed, both would delight in exacting a posthumous revenge through their fashioning of a dark and disagreeable portrait of Rupert in the respective pages of their History of the Great Rebellion and Diary, that would hold sway – and go largely unchallenged - within academic circles until the mid-1970s [5]. For Clarendon:

“the prince’s heart was so wholly set upon actions of war, that he not only neglected, but too much contemned the peaceable and civil arts, which were most necessary even to the carrying on of the other” [6].

Pepys saw him as brusquely authoritarian, with little aptitude for application or business. During sessions of the Tangier Committee, he noted that his colleague “doth nothing but swear and laugh a little, with an oath or two, and that’s all he doth” [7]. Furthermore, Rupert’s part in the creation and operation of the Admiralty Commission, that swept Pepys from office in 1679, was seen as resulting in little short of a national disaster. The picture that emerges from Pepys’ Memoirs of the Royal Navy, published in 1690, is of a period of endemic corruption, incompetence, squandered opportunity and of a service “abandoned to ruin” by a small clique of ideologues, rabble-rousers, and professional politicians [8].

These factors, when placed alongside the prince’s premature descent into ill-health - brought about by war wounds - and his failure to deliver spectacular naval victories against the Dutch in the wars of 1665-67 and 1672-74, effectively served to dissuade Rupert’s many biographers from probing too deeply into his later career as a soldier and statesman [9]. The sense of anti-climax was far too palpable, and the narrative was anything but straight forward. Therefore, in order to account for the discontinuities and failures, there grew a tendency to project what was known of his interests, character, and political alignments during the period of the Civil Wars onto his subsequent activities during the time of the Restoration and the Exclusion Crisis. This dominant narrative stressed continuity, adherence to social and religious order, and an unquestioning acceptance of the proto-absolutist, Caroline monarchy. At best, he was viewed as being politically quiescent and militarily spent. At worst he was portrayed as bumbling figure of fun, hopelessly out-of-touch with new military tactics and a revitalised court culture. “Perhaps”, as Brian Fergusson famously considered, “he was becoming a bit of a Colonel Blimp” [10]. It is a tag that has hung about his neck ever since, defeating the best efforts of novelists and dramatists to rescue much that is inspiring from his post-Naseby career. However, it is a characterisation that almost certainly stems from the portrayal of the prince by Nigel Bruce in the 1941 movie, Hudson’s Bay, as the portly and slow-witted foil to Vincent Price’s suave and astute, King Charles II, rather than from any contemporary source material [11].

The historical Rupert was not, however, without his admirers. He was celebrated as being a Protestant prince, the champion of “Old England” who worked to save old sailors from penury, and as a figure who appeared – on account of his military commands and flair for inventing new types of munitions – as: “At Once the Mars and Vulcan of the War” [12]. John Evelyn was surprised by the scope and sensuality of his artistic tastes; his new method for the manufacture of birdshot was both labour saving and deadly effective; and – unlike either Charles II or the Duke of York – he created a large personal library, stacked not only with naval charts and the journals of voyages, as might be expected, but also with the latest playscripts of Moliere, Corneille, and Racine, novels, prints and Classical histories [13]. Comenius dedicated his last work – Unum Necessarium / The One Thing Needful - to him in the hopes that he would become the protector of the exiled Czech Brethren; a pioneer metallurgist offered his treatise Metallographia: Or, an History of Metals in order to gain recognition and patronage; and the prince, himself, requested Sir John Pettus to write a reference work upon a history and description of the mining industry [14]. A young Tuscan traveller, on an intelligence gathering mission to England, was fascinated by his character and his ability to straddle private and public spheres, maintaining both his state and a familiarity with the commons. “His skill in the arts of the sailor and the engineer is incredible”, Lorenzo Magalotti wrote to inform his master, in 1669, and added that:

“He manages to perfect with his own hands – which are always scratched and calloused by the continual use of the file, chisel, and adze – whatever mechanical device it comes into his head to make. He delights in odours and in chemistry and has a very good knowledge of natural history” [15].

If Rupert did not so much invent the process of mezzotint, then he certainly refined its application and introduced this form of engraving to English craftsmen and artists. Similarly, the glass droplets that bear his name – and which combine explosive fragility in their tapering tails, with enormous tensile strength in their bulbous heads – were known in Northern Germany from the mid-1620s and were also experimented upon by Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle: the proto-feminist author whose works the prince owned and valued. However, it was Rupert who manufactured them in quantities in England and introduced them as a subject for discussion and inquiry to the Royal Society. His patents for experimental, lighter, and more accurate artillery guns, turned and cast in iron, were taken-up by John Browne and orders were filled for the fleet and ordnance office in the foundries of Kent and Sussex [16]. It is a shame that the archaeological work carried out at Windsor Castle has not, to date, registered the remains of the prince’s workshops, laboratory and furnaces that he had built during his residence as governor of the fortress.

Given Rupert’s undoubted curiosity and gift for invention, it seems strange that Pepys – as the liveliest commentator of his age - should fail to register an interest and preferred to concentrate, instead, upon recording the prince’s reflections upon the powers of prophecy and the occult [17]. The disconnect is significant and, I would argue, Pepys’ antipathy towards Rupert has been as important in shaping attitudes to the prince’s post-Restoration career as the strengths and weaknesses inherent in the major collection of papers, edited together in 1849, in order to provide the Memoirs of Prince Rupert for an appreciative Victorian readership [18]. The answer seems to be found in the areas of administrative practice, religion, and politics. We will look at each, in turn, as the careers of Pepys and Rupert intersected, and - as will become clear - the prince’s record defied received wisdoms.

Pepys’ initial view of Rupert was filtered through the Parliamentarian accounts and propaganda of the Civil Wars and by the attitudes of his initial patron, the Earl of Sandwich, who had fought against him on Naseby field. Separated by the gulf of class, wealth, nation, and profession, it is unsurprising that the youthful Pepys – measured, conscientious, and intent upon rising in the world through the application of his own talents – should resent the imperious manner and the scope for licence afforded to Rupert, purely on account of the privileged accident of his birth. Just as important, however, was the trajectory of Pepys’s career in the Navy Office. Having risen through Sandwich and Coventry, he consolidated and defined his position as the servant, confidant, and partisan of James, Duke of York. From the late 1660s onwards, this put him on a collision course with Rupert. For, to use modern – and anachronistic – parlance: as Pepys was steadily moving to the right of the political spectrum, the prince was edging left.

Rupert had overplayed his hand in demanding sole command of the fleet after the Battle of Lowestoft and had been politically outmanoeuvred by the ad hoc administrative alliance between Coventry, Sandwich, the Duke, and Pepys, that denied him office and split the command, in the summer of 1665, between the Earl of Sandwich and Sir William Penn. Rupert’s critique of the failure to secure victory against the Dutch in the campaign of 1666 blamed poor provisioning and corruption among the state’s servants, explicitly linking Pepys to what he saw as a bureaucratic malaise [19]. Though he survived the attack upon his office, the Surveyor General was hardly likely to forget such a serious slight and threat to his continued employment. His attempts to frustrate the rise of Sir Robert Holmes can, therefore, be viewed as part of a wider struggle between the clients of the Duke and the Prince over who should have control over the navy. Far more threatening to Pepys’ reputation was his willingness to acquiesce in the budgetary cuts of 1667, that ignored the defence of the Medway and laid-off the fleet’s crews, in the face of Rupert’s repeated warnings. Indeed, the prince was one of the few figures within the royal administration to emerge with any shred of credit when disaster struck and De Ruyter fell upon the battle fleet and the dockyards in the Thames, carrying-off The Royal Charles and burning three more first-rate ships at their moorings [20]. As one modern expert concluded, the scale of the defeat ensured that: “For the first time within memory, England was not the leading naval power” [21]

The Duke of York’s removal from office in 1673, as a result of the Test Acts barring Catholics from holding public office, and Pepys fall from power in 1679, have often been held as representing similar existential disasters for the Royal Navy. However, the recent researches of J.D. Davies and S. Hornstein have revealed an entirely different picture, which stresses the persuasive power of Pepys’ own naval history in obscuring the effectiveness of the administration in completing ambitious building schemes against a background of further governmental retrenchment, the development of new technologies in frigate construction, and the creation of a convoy system that both protected and projected English trade in the Mediterranean [22]. That Rupert was not only acceptable to – but actively allied with – the fresh Whig politicians who formed the Admiralty Commission in 1679 reflects something of the remarkably radical political journey that the prince had embarked upon since his return to England in September 1660.

As Pepys had so perceptively noted, he was singularly out-of-step with the prevailing court politics of the times. This revealed itself, primarily, through his attitudes towards the religious and foreign policy of the Crown. When faced by the resurgence of the episcopacy and laws against religious dissent, he argued on behalf of poor Quakers, enraging the 8th Earl of Derby in the process who felt that the prince was pushing his nose into his own control of justice as practised in Lancashire and the Isle of Man. Yet, Rupert went much further than that. He not only attempted to prevent the imprisonment and transportation of Quakers to the North American colonies, but also read what they had to say and employed them upon his business [23]. In this way, he entrusted Charles Bayley – who had been imprisoned in the Tower of London as a seditious radical from 1663-64 – with charting Hudson’s Bay and appointed him as governor of the new territory. Bayley part religious visionary, part hard-headed man of business, appears to have repaid the trust vested in him and his rise in the service of the company reflects its own sense of radicalism under Rupert’s leadership, between 1668-83. For a time, it stood within the City of London in opposition to the Duke of York’s Royal African Company, as a bastion of Whig influence. If Pepys resented and denigrated Rupert’s presence on the Tangier committee, then he did not witness or record his involvement with Hudson’s Bay, as the company fell outside of the Diary’s range and was politically off-limits to him. The prince was the leading promoter of the fledgling company, chairing meetings of the board in his own apartments, and providing the access to capital and shipping that would prove vital to its initial success [24]. An enormous tract of what would become northern Canada was labelled ‘Rupert’s Land’ in recognition of his services, and a busy port town in British Columbia still bears his name. Just as importantly, it brought him within the commercial and political sphere of the Earl of Shaftesbury, the leading opposition politician of the 1670s and early ‘80s.

Rupert’s friendship with Shaftesbury was one that persisted long after expediency or thoughts of self-preservation would allow, and has troubled the prince’s biographers [25]. The standard response has been to either ignore its significance or to suggest that Rupert was apolitical and had no real appreciation of political theory or the role played by Shaftesbury in the attempts to exclude James, Duke of York from the throne. If Rupert is not to be infantalised, or written-off on account of neurological damage and post-traumatic stress, then another picture suggests itself. He served alongside Shaftesbury on the Privy Council and government committees, shared business interests – not least through the creation of the Hudson’s Bay Company – and, just like him, had increasingly come to be identified with the ‘Country’, as opposed to the ‘Court’ interest. However, the two men approached the governance and policy of the Caroline state from different perspectives: Shaftesbury focused his attention upon parliament, the constitution and domestic politics, while Rupert – the European prince with a wider sense of diplomacy – concentrated upon foreign affairs and consistently warned about the growth of Louis XIV’s power and territorial ambition. Consequently, both men arrived at a critique of absolutism from a different perspective which struck a chord with, and informed, the other.

Rupert could negotiate shrewdly and tactfully when he wanted to. The court had laughed at his manhandling of the Portuguese ambassador at the reception of Catherine of Braganza, at Portsmouth in May 1662, while the French ambassador cordially despised him and filled his despatches with warnings of the enmity that he bore towards the ‘Sun King’ and his designs. However, he appears to have conducted effective negotiations on behalf of the Crown with the Habsburg Emperor, Leopold I, in 1661, with Frederick III of Demark in 1669, and with the council of the young Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg in 1670 [26]. In this light, his shoving of the Portuguese ambassador might have been less a display of temper than a public signal to his old friend, the Emperor, about his own opposition to the marriage alliance pursued by Charles II and Clarendon. Lorenzo Magalotti thought that: “There are those who praise him to the skies for very great judgment in political matters”, and the prince maintained a small number of ‘country’ MPs, including Andrew Marvell, to act in his interest as a recognisable group within the Commons [27]. The connection with Marvell – who was rumoured to be his political agent – is intriguing, not least as the poet followed a similar trajectory through the world of Restoration politics.

Unsurprisingly, the prince was removed from the centres of power during the negotiation of the Secret Treaty of Dover, in 1669, which forged an alliance between France and England, promised Charles II significant subsidies – so that he might circumvent Parliament - and offered military assistance should he need to forcefully reassert the Crown or embark on a policy of reconversion to Catholicism. The embassy to Denmark was a useful ruse but the reconstitution of the king’s inner council, with the promotion of the Duke of York’s supporters and the exclusion if those “who showed some independence of view” was a far more effective measure [28]. Rupert was amongst those who were side-lined, together with his friend Ormonde and a number of former Parliamentarian grandees.

The Treaty also committed Charles II to assisting the foreign policy aims of France and to pursuing a further war of aggression against Holland. It was against this background that Rupert fought, and came close to winning, the battle of Texel. If he has been celebrated for his Civil War exploits on land – which resulted in the cataclysmic defeats of Marston Moor and Naseby – then it is curious that his pyrrhic naval victories of the 1660s-70s have received far less attention and only faint praise. He was clearly proud of his own part in the fight on the Texel and provoked to fury by what he – and many of his contemporaries – believed was a betrayal by the allied French fleet that had denied him a triumph. Bishop Burnet was in no doubt that his outburst threatened to derail the entire alliance [29]. The experience certainly served to establish him as an unlikely figurehead for the opposition to growing monarchical power and as the hero of a new generation of London apprentices and the members of the Green Ribbon Clubs, whose parents had once shuddered at the tales of his depredations.

Thus, by the 1670s Rupert’s bookbinder was actively engaged in producing a wide range of pamphlets urging Exclusion, decrying the Duke of York, and promoting an uncompromisingly Protestant agenda [30]. It was in this atmosphere of heated ideological conflict that John Butler, a royal chaplain, appealed to Rupert on account of:

“your Highnesses Love to our Nation, your unwearied industry for the support of the True Religion Established by Law amongst us [and] your known and just indignation against the Roman Yoke” [31].

The prince’s own assessment, written in December 1679, as he took control of the Admiralty Commission, reveals not only his own priorities but also a grasp of politics and loaded nuance that defies the established view of his antipathy towards statecraft. “The king here”, he wrote:

“must decide either to call Parliament, and to cooperate with it, or he must raise the standard against it. In this struggle, he would be weaker. On the other hand, if he decides to take good counsel, to drive away his bad ministers, and to cooperate with Parliament, it lies in his hands to become the mightiest king that ever reigned in his kingdom” [32].

The supreme irony of this positional statement was that Rupert was echoing sentiments about the need for a mixed-monarchy, subject to checks and balances, that had been made throughout the 1630s-40s by the Parliamentary opposition led John Pym, Sir Arthur Heselrige, John Hampden, and Sir John Eliot. Similarly, his identification of “bad ministers” – as opposed to an intrinsically rotten system of monarchical government – as being the source of all the evils in the state, reflected the same distinction made by the military and political opponents of Charles I at the outbreak of the first Civil War. Those words would not have been lost upon the old and sickening Denzil Holles over the Christmas of 1679-80 just as Rupert would have been mindful of their political implications when he chose to employ them in order to veil a threat to the sovereign power. He was, after all, a man who kept copies of Machiavelli’s works alongside a 1651 edition of Hobbes’ Leviathan on his bookshelves, and who knew and favoured John Locke, promoting him as the secretary of the Hudson’s Bay Company [33].

Within this context, Rupert led the group of twenty peers who urged Charles II to call what would almost certainly have been an Exclusionist Parliament in January 1680, and led the opposition on the Privy Council to the impeachment of the Earl of Shaftesbury, in July 1681, amid a gathering Tory reaction. The significance of Rupert’s stance over the charges of treason brought against Shaftesbury has been repeatedly downplayed. He was directly challenging the will of the king and calling into doubt the succession and the key tenets of royal policy. In the event, he did what he always seems to have done when he met with resistance to his ideas by figures of authority: he stormed and attempted to lead a walk-out in the hopes that in might render the meeting in quorate. Two privy councillors followed in his wake before Charles II moved to prevent the act from becoming general, ordering his guards to bar the door and that the remaining privy councillors should sign the attainder “one and all”! [34]

In similar fashion, Rupert’s last public act was to testify in favour of an old Royalist soldier who had been brought before the Privy Council on charges that he would raise Somerset for the Duke of Monmouth. Rupert’s intervention was enough to secure his acquittal and “the next morning the Prince sent one of his gentlemen, Mr. Doucet, to invite Mr. Speke to dine with him”. He was, his son later recalled, “received and entertained in the most obliging manner by his Highness” [35]. Rupert had acted to deflect some of the king’s rage after Monmouth’s triumphant progress through the Western counties in the summer of 1681 and had put his house at Rhenen, in Holland, at the duke’s disposal in order to ease his passage into exile.

When Rupert contracted pleurisy after a visit to the theatre in November 1682, Charles II struck in order to extract a measure of revenge and to snuff-out the embers of his legacy. He denied Rupert’s dying request to have his Garter bestowed upon his natural son, Dudley Bard, and prevented a dynastic marriage between his daughter, Ruperta Hughes, and Lord Burford, the son of Nell Gwynn. There was no catafalque and no sound of kettle drums to herald his passing. Indeed, the official historian of Westminster Abbey, writing for a Victorian audience, thought that he had died “in embarrassed circumstances, and [was therefore] buried without the usual pomp” [36]. As with so many tasks, felt too difficult or distasteful by the King and the Duke of York, it was left to the elderly Lord Craven to wrap-up the prince’s affairs, to pay-off his household, to dispose of his goods, and to convey his body, by night, to the crypt. One wonders what emotions pulsed through Craven as he saw the lead casket wedged-in between of a corroded jumble of coffins, containing the infant children (both legitimate and illegitimate) of the Duke of York, to lie beside that of the prince’s mother, Elizabeth of Bohemia, whom the earl had devoted the greater part of his life and a considerable part of his fortune to maintain. What was certain was that no monument would be commissioned to mark the prince’s resting place in the Abbey and that his memory would sit as uncomfortably with the ruling house of Stuart as it did with Pepys as he returned to the secretariat of the Navy Office upon the eclipse of Rupert, Shaftesbury, and the first Whigs.

The eulogies and panegyrics published in the wake of the prince’s death did not dwell upon his Royalism but upon his love of an abstract – emphatically Protestant – England and his value to it as its epitome and leading naval commander. One devoted a large passage to a glowing testimony of the prince’s concern to pay his tradesmen and servants fairly and promptly: something that is borne out by the surviving account books for his household. For London’s artisans and apprentices, this was clearly a quality that mattered and which set him apart from other courtiers and the rest of the royals [37]. What was neatly side-stepped in the texts was any sense of Rupert’s culpability for the sufferings and loss occasioned by the Civil Wars. And it was this failure to address the essential discontinuity between the prince’s actions and popular reputation either side of the Restoration that fatally unbalanced the way in which posterity has come to view and assess him. However, the fault was not that of the opposition pamphleteers: but of Rupert, himself.

During the 1670s, he had reordered his papers and started work upon his own memoirs. These were, most likely, dictated to his secretary; are at times intensely personal; and have formed the basis for all of the subsequent, and extremely favourable, accounts of his early life. The problem is that they break-off suddenly with the prince’s arrival in England, at the start of the first Civil War, in 1642 [38]. It was as if Rupert was unable to fashion a successful narrative that would, on the one hand, accurately reflect the course of his actions during the conflict and, on the other, stop short of alienating his core base of supporters amid the contemporary politics of Exclusion. If it was too painful or difficult for him to accomplish this task, then others – namely Clarendon and Pepys – would. History, just like nature, abhors a vacuum. Therein, lies the final tragedy of Rupert’s life. For, his inability to build consensus and to accept alternate viewpoints – however mildly they were expressed – led him to alienate the two ablest administrators and historians of his age. The stifling of his own voice as the most reflexive member of the royal house denied posterity a vibrant counter-point to their projections, which – by default – became dominant. However, his transformation in the popular consciousness from the demonic, blood-soaked figure of the 1640s to the embodiment of virtue, heroism, and the nation’s hopes, by the early 1670s, was as unexpected as it was triumphal.

News of his return to command, wrote one naval captain turned anonymous pamphleteer, had provoked “a marvellous Concurrence of the Peoples Affections in City and Country, (all over the Kingdom)”. This was due in part to Rupert’s “Royal Stock”, his “High Courage, Conduct and long Experience in Affairs Military by Sea and Land, in this, and many other Nations”, but - as the author was at pains to emphasise through the printing of his text – it was “yet more in respect of His tried Constancy to, and zeal for the Reformed Protestant Profession of Religion, and all the interests thereof” [39]. This winning formula – which through a combination of character, beliefs, and design neither the king nor the Duke of York were capable of fulfilling – provided the prince with a radically new constituency, politics, and role within the governance of the three kingdoms. Only his sudden death prevented a final rupture with King Charles II and the public recognition of his service to the nascent Whig party. While it is tempting – not to mention great fun - to postulate ‘what if’ he had survived long enough to experience the Monmouth rising and the fall of his bete noire, James II, projecting unrealised hopes onto him – just as his Whig supporters had done throughout the 1670s-80s – this course of action places the historian on decidedly shaky professional ground.

Instead, it seems safer and, perhaps, more satisfying still, to suggest that Rupert’s later career – far from being a disagreeable coda to the romance of his youth – permitted him the freedom to express his own considerable creative gifts in the realm of the arts of sciences, to hone his skills as both seaman and statesman, and to reflect upon the nature and objects of war and to draw startlingly new conclusions from them. Were this not redemption enough, then when the world was once again “Turned Upside Down” in 1688, and his closest confidant Charles Gerrard rode into London at the head of the Lifeguard of the Prince of Orange, the old soldier might have sought to set Prince Rupert’s March alongside the jaunty strains of Lillibulero as a symbol of past hopes and a call to future action.

John Callow, April 2021

[1] S. Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. R.C. Latham & W. Matthews, (London:HarperCollins, 1971 rpt. 1995), (29 September 1660), Vol.I p.255. [2] H. Trevor-Roper, ‘Prince Rupert, the Cavalier’ in: H. Trevor-Roper, From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution, (Pimlico, London, 1992 rpt. 1993), p.211; M. Stoyle, The Black Legend of Prince Rupert’s Dog. Witchcraft and Propaganda during the English Civil War, (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2011), pp.36-37; J. Sprigge, Anglia Rediviva; England’s Recovery, (London: R.W. for John Partridge, 1647), pp.111-112; J. & T. Webb, Memorials of the Civil War between King Charles I and the Parliament of England, As it Affected Hertfordshire, (London: Longmans Green & Co., 1879), Vol.I p.305; B. Whitelock, Memorials of English Affairs, (London: Nathaniel Ponder, 1682), Vol.I p.197; D. Purkiss, The English Civil War. A People’s History, (London: HarperPress, 2006), pp.187-188, 425; E. Scott, Rupert, Prince Palatine, (Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co., Westminster, 1899), p.334. [3] K.H.D. Haley, William of Orange and the English Opposition, 1672-4, (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1953 rpt. 1975), p.120. [4] P. Morrah, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, (London: Constable, 1976), p.353; J. Lamb, So Idle a Rogue: The Life and Death of Lord Rochester, (London: Allison & Busby, 1993), pp.160-161; J. Callow, The Making of King James II, (Thrupp, Stroud: Sutton Publishing Ltd., 2000), p.129. [5] The reclamation of the prince’s reputation is two be found in three quite different works, by three of the most brilliant and original scholars of their generation. Namely: L.C. O’Malley, ‘The Whig Prince: Prince Rupert and the Court vs. Country Factions during the Reign of Charles II’, Albion, Vol.VIII Part 4, (Winter 1976), pp.333-350; R. Hutton, The Royalist War Effort, 1642-1646, Second Edition, (London & New York: Routledge, 1982 rpt. 1999); P. Newman, The Battle of Marston Moor, (Chichester: Anthony Bird Publications, 1981). All repositioned Rupert within the burgeoning counter-culture and channelled, to a greater or lesser extent, impulses drawn from popular, youth culture that had already appeared in: King Crimson, ‘Prince Rupert Awakes’ on Lizard, (Island Records, 1970); P. Anderson, A Midsummer Tempest, (London: Futura Publications, 1974 rpt. 1975). [6] E. Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1849), Vol.III Book VII: 279. [7] Pepys, Diary, Vol.VII (20 October 1666), p.332; Pepys, Diary, (3 June 1664), Vol.V p.167 [8] S. Pepys, Memoires Relating to the State of the Royal Navy of England, For Ten Years Determin’d December 1688, (London: Benjamin Griffin, 1690), p.81. See also: A. Bryant, Samuel Pepys. The Years of Peril, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), pp.71-72, 258, 344, 371, 392. [9] G. Martin, ‘Prince Rupert and the Surgeons’, History Today, Vol.40, (December 1990), pp.38-43; G.M. Thomson, Warrior Prince. Prince Rupert of the Rhine, (London: Secker & Warburg, 1976), pp.225-226. Pepys mistakenly believed that the hole cut in the prince’s periwig was to help relieve the pressure on sores caused by the onset of syphilis, as opposed to letting his war wounds, heal. See: Pepys, Diary, Vol.VI (15 January 1665), p.12. [10] B. Fergusson, Rupert of the Rhine, (Collins, London, 1952 rpt. 1953), p.133. See also: R. Gower, Rupert of the Rhine, (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1890), pp.122-124; S. (aka Beatrice) Erskine, A Royal Cavalier. The Romance of Rupert Prince Palatine, (London: Everleigh Nash, 1910), pp.370-374; M.C. Bushe, Rupert of the Rhine: The History of a Brave Prince, (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1868), p.190. In 1934, Clennell Wilkinson, constraining the last 37 years of the prince’s life into a mere 12 pages of a 251 page study, neatly summed-up the position of these authors, “We have done with Rupert the Cavalier. There remains only to glance briefly at the careers of those considerably less interesting personages, Rupert the Admiral and Rupert the Courtier”: C. Wilkinson, Prince Rupert the Cavalier, (London: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., 1934), p.239. [11] F. Knight, Prince of Cavaliers. The Story of the Life and Campaigns of Prince Rupert of the Rhine, (Macdonald & Co. Ltd., London, 1967), p.169; M. Irwin, Stranger Prince. The Story of Rupert of the Rhine, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1937), pp.579-592; M. Irwin, The Bride. The Story of Louise and Montrose, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1939), pp.420-422. The best and most satisfying novelisations of the prince’s later career are to be found in a charming short story written for children and in an unfairly over-looked and under-rated work for adults. See, respectively: D.M. Stuart, ‘’The Warlock of Windsor’ in The Young Clavengers, (London: University of London Press, 1947), pp.125-175; E. D’Oyley, The English March, (London: Michael Joseph, 1953). [12] Anon., An Elegy on That Illustrious and High-Born Prince Rupert Who Dyed on Wednesday November 29th, (Langly Ciurtis, London, 1682), f.1. [13] J. Evelyn, Diary, ed. G. de la Bedoyere, (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1995), p.178; D. Baird, ‘His Highness Prince Rupert’s Way of Making Shot; 1665’, Arms Collecting, Vol.11 No.3 (undated, c. March 1973), pp.83-85; British Library, Sloane MS.555, ‘Catalogue of Books, 1677’, ff. 3, 6, 6 verso, 9 verso, 14 verso, 21, 23, 23 verso. [14] British Library, Sloane MS.555, ‘Catalogue of Books, 1677’, ff. 8, 11 verso. [15] W.E.K. Middleton (ed.), Lorenzo Magalotti at the Court of Charles II. His Relazione d’Inghilterra of 1668, (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 1980), p.39. [16] British Library, Sloane MS.555, ‘Catalogue of Books, 1677’, ff. 5, 5 verso; S. Barter Bailey, Prince Rupert’s Patent Guns, (Leeds: Royal Armouries Museum, 2000), pp.97-129. [17] Pepys, Diary, Vol.VII (20 October 1666), p.333; British Library, Sloane MS.555, ‘Catalogue of Books, 1677’, ff. 5, 6, 12, 14 verso, 19, 20 verso. [18] Hutton, Royalist War Effort, pxxxii; E. Warburton, Memoirs of Prince Rupert and the Cavaliers, 3 vols., (London: Richard Bentley, 1849). [19] V. Brome, The Other Pepys, (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1992), p.107. [20] Warburton (ed.), Memoirs of Prince Rupert and the Cavaliers, Vol.III pp.480-485. [21] F. Fox, Great Ships. The Battlefleet of King Charles II, (Greenwich: Conway Maritime Press, 1980), p.94. [22] J.D. Davies, ‘Pepys and the Admiralty Commission of 1679-84’, Historical Research, Vol.LXII (1989), pp.34-53; S. Hornstein, The Restoration Navy and English Foreign Trade, 1674-1688. A Study in the Peacetime Use of Sea Power, (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1991), pp.11, 258-262, 264. [23] L. Shapiro (ed. & trans.), The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and Rene Descartes, (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp.183-184, 187, 189; J. Besse, A Collection of the Sufferings of the People Called Quakers, (London: Luke Hinde, 1753), Vol.I pp.279-280; J.W. Radcliffe & C.K. Radcliffe, A History of Kirk Maughold, (Douglas: Manx Museum & National Trust, 1979), pp.146-150; British Library, Sloane MS.555, ‘Catalogue of Books, 1677’, f.11. [24] E.E. Rich (ed.), Minutes of the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1671-1674, (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1942), pp.9, 12, 54, 67, 81, 103, 131-132, 209-213; E.E. Rich (ed.), Minutes of the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1679-1684, (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1945), Vol.I pp. 36, 46, 53, 60, 63, 95-97, 105, 107, 110, 115, 125-126, 244-245, 149, 153, 196. [25] K.H.D. Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp.655, 729; M. Ashley, Rupert of the Rhine, (Abingdon: Purnell Book Services, 1976), p.186; Thomson, Warrior Prince, pp.208-209; J. Cleugh, Prince Rupert. A Biography of Rupert, Prince, Count Palatine of the Rhine, Duke of Bavaria, Duke of Cumberland, Earl of Holdernesse, (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1934), pp.263-264; C. Spencer, Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier, (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007), pp.362, 365; Wilkinson, Prince Rupert the Cavalier, p.250. [26] O’Malley, ‘Whig Prince’, p.333. [27] Middleton (ed.), Lorenzo Magalotti at the Court of Charles II, p.39; N. Murray, World Enough and Time. The Life of Andrew Marvell, (London: Little, Brown & Co., 1999), p.134. [28] Haley, William of Orange and the English Opposition, p.43. [29] Anon., An Exact Relation of the Several Engagements and Actions of His Majesties Fleet Under the Command of His Highnesse Prince Rupert. And of all Circumstances concerning this Somers Expedition, Anno 1673, (London: J.B., 1673), pp.19-21; Haley, William of Orange and the English Opposition, p.153; J.R. Bruijin, R.P. van Reine & R. van Hovell tot Westerflier (eds.), De Ruyter – Dutch Admiral, (Rotterdam: Karwansaray, 2011), pp.115-118; G. Burnet, History of His Own Time, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1833), Vol.II p.15; J.R. Jones, The Anglo-Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth Century, (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1996), pp. 208-211. [30] S. Herne, A Discourse on Divine Providence, (London: T. Newcomb for G. Kunholt, 1679); T. Oates, A Sermon Preached at St. Michael’s Wood-Street, at the request of some friends; and now published to present witnesses, (London: T. Hills & T. Newcomb for G. Kunholt, 1679); Anon., The Informations of John Sergeant, and David Maurice: Gentlemen; relating to the Popish Plot, (London: G. Kunholt, 1681). Oates’ pamphlet was dedicated to the prince. [31] J. Butler, Christian Liberty Asserted in Opposition to the Roman Yoke, Delivered in a Sermon Preached in His Majesties Royal Chapel of Windsor. The 8th of Decemb[er] 1678, (London: M.C. for Walter Kettilby, 1678), f.4. [32] O’ Malley, ‘Whig Prince’, p.347. [33] British Library, Sloane MS.555, ‘Catalogue of Books, 1677’, f.6. [34] Haley, Shaftesbury, p.655. [35] Warburton (ed.), Memoirs of Prince Rupert and the Cavaliers, Vol.III pp.509-510. In the event, father and son failed to raise the West Country for Monmouth in 1681 but they turned-out for him in 1685. On that occasion, Rupert was not there to save them. Charles Speke was hanged at Ilminster after refusing to turn evidence against his comrades. John Speke who had led “a ragged party of horse” for Monmouth, escaped and later became the MP for Taunton in 1695. [36] A.P. Stanley, Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey, 5th edition, (London: John Murray, 1882), p.163. [37] Anon., Historical Memoires of the Life and Death of that Wise and Valiant Prince Rupert of the Rhine, Duke of Cumberland, (London: Thomas Matthews, 1683), f.xiv; British Library, Add, MS. 29,767, ‘Prince Rupert’s Household Accounts (30 September 1679 – 28 November 1682’, ff.6-8, 25, 69-70. [38] British Library, Landsdown MS. 817, ‘The History of Prince Rupert’, f.166. [39] Anon., An Exact Relation of the Several Engagements and Actions of His Majesties Fleet Under the Command of His Highnesse Prince Rupert, p.2.