CHARLES I, KING OF ENGLAND, SCOTLAND & IRELAND. Copies of 2 letters from King Charles I to Lord Middleton, August and September, 1646.

Manuscript. Large folio. Paris, Scots College, 3 November 1735. Three pages, written in a neat 18th-century hand in brown ink. Original fold marks, minor staining and slight creasing consistent with age, but in very good condition.
Copies of 2 letters from King Charles I to Lord Middleton, Aug. and Sept. 1646. It has not been established whether the originals of these letters survive, but in any case this transcription is of great historical importance because of its genesis: it was copied by ‘The Administrators of the Scots College of Paris … from the originals written in King Charles the 1st ‘s own hand and deposited in our … College … 3 November 1738’. Most of the Scots College’s papers were later lost in the French Revolution. John, 1st Earl of Middleton (c.1608-74), had been a leading military figure in the Civil Wars in Scotland of the 1640s, being appointed Major-General of the Scottish New Model Army in 1647. Overtures from Charles, as evidenced in these letters, were more than a year in advance of his involvement in the Engager Army, a faction of the Covenanters that entered into a secret pact with the imprisoned Charles in December 1647 and that went on to fight Cromwell’s forces in northern England (and to lose). Middleton suffered many reverses of fortune during the Commonwealth years, but he later emerged as the dominant figure in Restoration Scotland - before being removed to ‘honourable exile’ as governor to Tangier in 1663. His son Charles, the 2nd Earl Middleton (c.1649-1719), became a close friend of James II and, after imprisonment by the Williamite government, fled to France in 1692, where he became a major figure in the Jacobite Court and later James’s Secretary of State. Charles (and his sons) accompanied James III on the attempted Franco-Jacobite invasions of Scotland in 1708 and in 1715. This document, created some weeks after the death of the second earl’s younger son Charles Jr, may have been commissioned by a legatee to help protect Middleton family property back in Scotland.
The Scots College at Paris served as a repository for many Jacobite and Stuart relics and manuscripts following the exile of the royal family and their loyalists. The present document likely derives from that collection or from a later dispersal of its papers in the early nineteenth century.
An evocative piece of Stuart correspondence, offering insight into the tone and political strategy of Charles I during his final months of power. This officially attested eighteenth-century copy provides an important witness to lost or dispersed royal letters, linking the royalist cause of the 1640s to the Jacobite heritage of the Scots College nearly a century later.

[Cat 162]