On the Hippodrome in Karlovy Vary

God- and for that matter, my liver- knows I am no Puritan. Now, like anyone interested in the strange nature of the English, I quote with glee Isaac Foot’s method for the discernment of character- ‘I judge a man by one thing, which side would he have liked his ancestors to fight on at Marston Moor’- but endorsement, as many a Twitter biography, fearful of that malevolent platform’s tendency to turn even nastier than it already is, reminds us, is not necessarily the natural outworking of quotation. I need hardly resort to references from the Almighty, or my organs, to reveal that the late Mr Foot and I- though agreeing on the importance of Marston Moor- would not have been shoulder to shoulder on that windswept patch of land bisected in latter days by the B1224.

Yet, for all my cavalier enthusiasm, I find the characters on the side I purport to retrospectively back difficult to relate to. As with all good fiction, the stories we tell about the past are most powerful when, in the idle moments when our eyes flit from the page and glaze over in pursuit of the imagined, we can conceive of ourselves talking or joking or dining with the titans of whom we read. Muster as much partisan vim as I can, I cannot imagine so doing with the severe Wentworth, nor the pernickety Laud, nor even the shy and distant King himself. It goes without saying that I still view them in a better light than the odious Pym or monstrous Cromwell or even, appealing though Robert Morley’s glutton is in 1970’s Cromwell¸ the slippery Manchester; but I still cannot view them with a social warmth to match my vigour for their cause.

There is, however, one exception, a living model amidst a parade of waxworks, one who, for all his faults- and they were many, both in the saddle and the salon- I can imagine spending time with in the here and now, and what’s more, enjoying doing so: Prince Rupert. That he was reckless, arrogant, and had his hands stained with some of the worst horrors of his age, from Bolton to Benin- all this I know, and yet, like those friends we all have whom we like despite what we know to be the justified disapproval of others, I feel fond of him. I cannot imagine sneaking into a stranger’s house party with Laud, nor wagering trifles on non-events with Pym- yet with Rupert I can. He seems more recognisable, more like people I might have met, than the loftier types on either side at Marston Moor.

Undoubtedly this is, in part, due to a conflation of tastes (for, in truth, my modern Cavalier sympathies are rooted in love of wine and laughter rather than in zeal for a now emasculated crown) but I also detect within my own breast a twinge of sympathy for Rupert the man, rather than Rupert the Prince. The offspring of the couple the Czechs call ‘The Winter King and Queen’, from the moment he was tossed, as a mere bundle of swathing bands, into the carriage fleeing Prague and his father’s lost kingdom, he was destined to be a wanderer. How fitting that he, the original ‘citizen of nowhere’, should delight in the title ‘Prince of the Rhine’; not a titular claim to solid earth but instead a lifelong association with an ever-rolling stream, destined to bear his pretensions away.

He was a gifted general with no great victory to his name, an admiral with but a sapling’s worth of the oaken wall that his successors would delight in, a prince without any real principality and, perhaps most cruelly, a great sportsman destined to be remembered, courtesy of Pepys, as merely ‘the fourth best tennis player in England’. I think that twinge of sympathy for Rupert really comes from him being, in truth, both a failure by any real historical measure and also a vagrant like figure, flitting across continents and ages. Even when he did settle down, delighting in his illegitimate child Ruperta, his domesticity was short lived. He was, unlike so many of those titans from the pages of the history books, never tied to people or place; he was a man without a home.

Karlovy Vary- the erstwhile Karlsbad- has long been a place where the great and the good found refuge from their Atlas-like burdens. From Emperor Charles IV’s first calming foray into its hot springs to the likes of Metternich and Clemenceau pounding its prettily paved colonnades in later centuries, it has long had a pre-eminent role as a resort well suited for true relaxation. As with all such resorts, it succeeded in being so suited by making its temporary residents feel as if they were at home. It is replete with grand hotels- the sort of places in which wealthy widows or retired imperial civil servants, rejected by their adopted (or subjected) land and unrecognised by their native one, would shack up to await the inevitable. Indeed, the pace of life there mirrors the doings of such imagined types perfectly; there is not a great deal to do in Karlovy Vary, but that is rather the point, one is instead invited to be.

I can claim neither greatness nor goodness- and, even if I did, Karlovy Vary is now but a gloriously shabby shadow of the gilded playground it once was- but I too felt at home there, if anything more delighted by the faint whiff of artifice and mildew about it all. I know I ought to feel such unburdening in the shadow of whitewashed cloisters or in the bosom of my family but, God knows I am no Puritan, and so it is among the Becherovka and wrought iron screens of faded Mitteleuropa that I can claim to feel at home. Specifically, I felt an overwhelming sense of contentment whilst wandering the length of the Hippodrome (built, it is said, to provide horse racing with the sole purpose of helping the future Edward VII to feel at home) with two friends. The mid September sun was just warm enough, just the right amount of Czech beer sat snugly in our stomachs, and conversation flowed at the right tempo for such an afternoon- steering nobly between stilted anecdote and maniacal patter. It was there, surprisingly, that I was reminded of Rupert.

As we wandered along lost in the hazy mists of friendship, I spotted a billboard advertising the Cena Zimní Královna- the Winter Queen Cup- one of Czech horseracing’s more coveted prizes and named for Elizabeth Stuart, the mother of that strangely lifelike long dead Prince. It occurred to me then that my soft spot for Rupert had a different stem; that we had things but, more importantly, also places in common. Of course, it will only ever be but a figment of my imagination to picture the carriage, emblazoned with the meaningless arms of a king without a kingdom, flying along the high road past the nascent spa town of Karlsbad with an infant prince peering wide-eyed onto the turf that would later become the scene of my idle comfort, but there is another place the stones of which we have both indubitably trod.

When Rupert was in Oxford during the Civil War he was billeted in the college that would become my own. It is said he was in good spirits for the length of his stay- surrounded by the lieutenants who were his friends, in whose company he might truly relax and, like Metternich or Clemenceau as they paced the colonnades, shrug off his cares for just an evening or two. In short, it was behind that plain façade on St Giles that he felt at home. By contrast, I never felt at home there- indeed I loathed almost all my time within its walls- but I was lucky enough to find friends, sparring partners and fellow drinkers amongst whom I might feel, as I did at the Hippodrome in Karlovy Vary, homely contentment. I like to think, amidst all his scuttling across the continent and across a long career of failure, that such friendships were where Rupert finally might have felt at home too.