by David Cohen
The Lord Protector – and his son
The new Constitution gave Cromwell the right to appoint a successor and he turned to his third – and eldest surviving – son, Richard Cromwell, even though he had been disappointed in him when Richard was a young man. Until he was thirty, Richard’s great achievements were to marry a rich country girl and be appointed a Justice of the Peace for Hampshire. Cromwell had great expectations and, like many fathers, was disappointed. He wrote acidly to Richard’s father-in-law: ‘I would have him mind and understand business, read a little history, study the mathematics and cosmography: these are good, with subordination to the things of God. Better than idleness, or mere outward worldly contents. These fit for public services, for which a man is born.’
The lazy son was not allowed to sit in Parliament until 1654, but then his father’s attitude changed and Cromwell made sure Richard became the Member of Parliament for Cambridge University, though he had never been a student there. Cromwell then involved Richard in the administration of the country. In July 1657, his son was appointed Chancellor of Oxford University, although he had not studied there either. Richard was promoted again in December and made a member of the powerful Council of State. Nine months later, when his father died on 3 September 1658, Richard was informed that he was to succeed him.
When he heard that Cromwell was dead, Charles was cautious. The next eighteen months saw a game of cat and mouse being played by the son of the brilliant dictator and that of the failed King. Ironically, Cromwell probably would have been prouder of his son than Charles I might have been of his: Charles II was more willing to compromise than the father he loved had ever been.
The new Lord Protector faced two problems – the country was £2 million in debt and the army questioned his authority because Richard had not fought even one skirmish in the Civil War. Politically, however, Richard was quite skilful. He called a new Parliament, which was divided between moderate Presbyterians, crypto-royalists and a few determined republicans. Richard managed these differences reasonably well but the army proved less pliable. In April 1659, the army’s General Council met to demand higher taxation to pay for what the military always want: more men and more equipment. They sent a petition to the new Lord Protector, who sent it on to Parliament, which refused to be bullied. In response to the army, the Commons then banned all meetings of army officers unless they had the permission of the Lord Protector and Parliament. Parliament capped its defiance by passing a resolution that all officers should swear an oath that they would not use force to subvert the sitting of Parliament. The army was outraged and demanded Richard dissolve Parliament.
Richard refused, so, to show who really controlled the country, the generals gathered in St James’s Palace. He now gave in and dissolved Parliament. There were no new elections but the surviving members of the Rump Parliament were summoned back to Westminster. Sitting began on 7 May 1659.
As the crisis developed, the French ambassador approached Richard with an extraordinary proposition, given that France was a monarchy: France would provide troops to fight the army on behalf of Parliament. The King of France, Louis XIV, was uninhibited by the fact that Charles happened to be his cousin. Perhaps unwisely, Richard refused the French offer. On 25 May, after the Rump agreed to pay his debts and give him a pension, he resigned. Richard was never formally deposed or arrested, but simply allowed to fade away. Of course, royalists rejoiced at his fall and he became the butt of many satires, which mocked him with nicknames such as ‘Tumble Down Dick’ and ‘Queen Dick’.
In Holland, Charles was being courted for the first time since his father had been beheaded. Here, there is a parallel with Elizabeth I: Charles had had a traumatic childhood, just as Elizabeth had experienced a century earlier. He wanted revenge because he loved his father but, like Elizabeth, he was highly intelligent and saw the need for forgiveness. Charles agreed to the Declaration of Breda, which promised a general pardon for crimes committed during the Civil War and the Protectorate for everyone who now recognised him as the lawful King. On 2 May 1660, Parliament passed a resolution that ‘government ought to be by King, Lords and Commons’. Charles was invited to return and, on 8 May, he was proclaimed King.
Relatively few of Cromwell’s allies were punished, but Charles did pursue those who had personally condemned his father to death. Nine were hanged, drawn and quartered, including Gregory Clement and Thomas Harrison, both of whom had signed the King’s death warrant. Two unrepentant republicans and around another twenty people were forbidden to sit in Parliament or to hold any public office. Meanwhile, Richard Cromwell had the good sense to disappear.
There are some nice parallels between Richard Cromwell’s fate and that of Charles: both had to be enterprising, devious and to appear not to support their fathers in order to stay alive. After July 1660, Richard travelled to Europe using a number of pseudonyms, though there is little evidence that he was being actively hunted. He was once invited to dine with the Prince of Conti, who did not know his true identity and observed, ‘Well that Oliver, tho’ he was a traitor and a villain, was a brave man, had great parts, great courage, and was worthy to command; but that Richard, that coxcomb and poltroon, was surely the basest fellow alive; what is become of that fool?’ Richard replied: ‘He was betrayed by those he most trusted, and who had been most obliged by his father.’ The next morning, he left the Count’s house and he did not return to England until twenty years after the Restoration.
‘Six bastard Dukes survive his luscious reign’ – Daniel Defoe on Charles II
Charles had learned from his father’s failures and, once he was King, enjoyed the kind of popularity that had always eluded the first Charles. But, where Henrietta had delivered a succession of healthy babies, her son was less lucky – and the country paid for it. Charles married Catherine of Braganza but they had no children, though he had at least twelve by seven of his mistresses. Princess Diana could include in her own ancestry two of Charles’s illegitimate sons: Henry FitzRoy, whom Charles made Duke of Grafton, and Charles Lennox, who became the first Duke of Richmond. The King seems to have been rather fond of his children. Royal accounts often mention sums for cradles, rattles and other toys. He was also proud of the two sons that he had by Nell Gwyn. In April 1684, Lady Mary Tudor (Charles’s daughter by Moll Davis) was given money to pay her chambermaid, laundry maid, page and footman. The King even paid for the weddings of all these children. The poet Andrew Marvell put it nicely:
The misses take place, each advanced to be duchess
With pomp as great as queens in their coach and six horses
The bastards made dukes, earls, viscounts and lords
With all the title that honour affords.
Charles got on well with his daughters too, especially Charlotte. He sent her notes, signing himself as her loving and kind father. There is a picture of her tickling the King’s bald head as he dozes after lunch, a gesture he was delighted by.
It has been reckoned that over half the hereditary peers in the House of Lords can trace their ancestry to the merry and promiscuous Charles II.
Charles’s brother James was more fertile in wedlock. His eldest daughter, Mary, was born on 30 April 1662 and named after Mary, Queen of Scots. James’s wife, Anne Hyde, gave birth to seven more children, but only Mary and her younger sister Anne survived. Mary became second in line to the throne and Anne third.
To the dismay of his mother Henrietta, Charles ordered his nieces to be brought up as Protestants. They were moved to Richmond Palace, where they were raised by Lady Frances Villiers, with only occasional visits to see their parents. The marriage between James and Lady Anne Hyde was never an easy one and it became increasingly unhappy as James had at least as many mistresses as his brother. Though a bad husband, James also seems, as Samuel Pepys noted, to have been a devoted father. Anne Hyde, made wretched by her husband’s infidelities, died on 31 March 1671.
Two years after his wife died, James remarried. He tried to charm his daug
hters into accepting his second wife, Mary of Modena. ‘I have brought you a new playfellow,’ he wrote to his eldest daughter, Mary. She was eleven years old while her stepmother was only four years older. The age difference mattered far less than the fact that her father had married a Catholic and, worse still, one who had wanted to be a nun. Mary of Modena had been persuaded to marry James by her priests, who convinced her that she might help return England to the Catholic Church. For both his daughters, James was now an apostate.
James’s eldest daughter, Mary, started to behave very strangely: she wrote passionate letters to an older girl, Frances Apsley; the letters delivered by a drawing teacher who happened to be a dwarf, just to add a baroque touch. The correspondence lasted for seventeen years. In it, Mary addressed Frances usually as ‘dear husband’. Gossipy, but also full of endearments, the letters read like love letters; they were a conceit but conceits can conceal true feelings, especially perhaps when one girl calls another girl her ‘husband’.
‘You have no reason to challenge me with unkindness to my husband,’ Mary wrote early on, after she and Frances had had a tiff. ‘I should be very base to be so to one from whom I have received so much kindness. Clarine is so much Aurelia’s servant that she shall ever be your obedient wife.’ In this fantasy, Mary styled herself as Clarine and Frances as Aurelia.
Again, Freud comes to mind. While a teenager, he and his friend Eduard Silberstein wrote letters to each other as if they were dogs who for some reason lived at a hospital in Seville. Some biographers have suggested the correspondence was the first of a number of indications that Freud had some homosexual leanings. The passionate letters between Clorine and Aurelia also suggest some homoerotic undercurrent between Mary and Frances, though they may not have been aware of it.
The next crucial moment in the family history came when Mary was fifteen and was betrothed to her cousin, the Protestant Stadtholder of Holland, William of Orange. Charles II pressured his brother to agree to the marriage, which he hoped would make James more popular with Protestants. But Mary was not thrilled. When her father told her that she was to marry William, ‘she wept all that afternoon and all the following day’. Though extremely cool to her husband-to-be when William came to London for a month, she was given no choice. As soon as they were married, William took his reluctant bride off to Holland – and, miraculously, everything changed. They spent two weeks more or less alone in a small Dutch town. From then on, Mary was a devoted wife. It seems likely that William introduced her to the physical pleasures of marriage.
By 1684, James II’s wife, Mary of Modena, had been pregnant many times but only four babies lived for any length of time: Isabella, who survived almost five years before dying of a fever, Catherine Laura, Charlotte Maria and a boy, who was christened Charles to please the King. The infant got smallpox when he was just five weeks old, however, and was dead within a matter of days. Mary’s ordeals would pale into comparison with those of her stepdaughters, however.
The marriage of Mary’s sister Anne to the Protestant Prince, George of Denmark, was also arranged by Charles II and turned out to be a strong one. They were faithful and devoted, though forced to bear a succession of tragedies. Within months, Anne was pregnant but the baby was stillborn. Her second child was stillborn, too. On 2 June 1685, Anne had a second daughter, who seemed to be healthy but, when she was twenty months old, died of smallpox.
When Anne’s fourth child lived, James unwisely tried to persuade her to baptise her daughter as a Catholic. At this, Anne burst into tears. ‘The Church of Rome is wicked and dangerous,’ she wrote to her sister, ‘their ceremonies – most of them – plain downright idolatry.’
When Charles II died in 1685, James became King. The differences between him and his daughters now assumed huge political importance. He knew that he could not make Britain a Catholic country again and so he settled on a more modest ambition – stopping discrimination against Catholics. As a result of his religious ambitions, he paid little attention to Anne, who gave birth to a third daughter in May 1686 (that baby also died in infancy). A decent father would have realised his daughter needed help. Her sister was in Holland, but James was obsessed with making England at the very least possible for Catholics to live in.
In April 1687, James issued a Declaration of Indulgence which would allow Catholics to worship according to their rites. The following year he ordered this Declaration be read in every church in the land, but seven bishops objected, including the Archbishop of Canterbury. James now gave up any pretence of being tolerant; he had the bishops arrested and tried for seditious libel.
And unto us a child is given – possibly in a warming pan
James had been married for eleven years to Mary of Modena when he became King. She was twenty-six years old and he was fifty-one. Mary now did something curious: with her stepdaughter Anne, she travelled to Tunbridge Wells to take the healing waters. It was assumed she was trying to get pregnant but nothing happened. Two years later, Mary decided to visit that other royal spa, Bath. She believed its waters had helped her conceive her son, Charles, back in 1677. The Queen’s most trusted physician, Dr Waldegrave, thought the trip to Bath an excellent idea. On 16 August, the King joined his wife there and stayed for five days. He then left for Wales, stopping at the famous Well of St Winifred to pray for a son. Today, the Well has a shop that sells holy water, as well as a variety of what a former monk and a former nun (both my friends) describe as ‘Catholic kitsch’.
While her husband prayed at the Well, the Queen bathed in the Cross Bath where a cross was placed in memory of her son, Charles. Bathing was a grand public spectacle: the Queen wore a stiff yellow canvas with large sleeves so that no one could begin to guess the shape of her body. The holiday turned into a spectacle, though: whenever she set any part of the royal body in the water, the ever-present Italian string orchestra would start to play.
In early 1687, Anne needed her family again and James should have been consoling his daughter. She miscarried once and, a few days later, her husband caught smallpox. Their two young daughters were infected and died, though their father survived. George and Anne had ‘taken [the deaths] very heavily ... Sometimes they wept, sometimes they mourned in words; then sat silent, hand in hand; he sick in bed, and she the carefullest nurse to him that can be imagined,’ wrote Rachel Wriothesley, daughter of the Earl of Southampton, previously one of Charles II’s ministers.
In the circumstances, the King needed to be tactful when informing his daughters that his wife was expecting another child, but he seemed to have expected them to simply be glad for him. Callously, he appears to have forgotten that both his daughters had suffered the death of one child after another. By 1688, they had lived through at least eight pregnancies and neither sister had a child who was still alive. Now an older woman might give birth and possibly give birth to a boy. A son of James II would not only bolt onto the throne ahead of the sisters but would try to make the kingdom Catholic again. The precedent, Mary Tudor’s reign, was not a happy one.
Three months before the Queen’s child was born, Anne wrote to her sister: ‘I cannot help feeling that the Queen’s belly is a little suspicious. It is true indeed that she is very big but she looks better than she ever did which is not usual for people when they are far gone for in the most part they look very ill.’ In her book on the Queens of England, Agnes Strickland admitted that she was surprised the sisters did not insist on staying with the Queen to make sure she was really carrying a child (Anne, in fact, went to Bath). Strickland concluded that Anne left London because the Queen ‘had given her indisputable proofs that she was about to become a mother and Anne went purposely out of her way that she might not be a witness of the birth of a brother whose rights she intended to dispute’.
Few pregnancies have been the subject of so much scandal and speculation as Mary of Modena’s. James’s daughters were convinced that this was not so much a phantom pregnancy as a fraudulent one. In return, James felt he had to prove his wife
truly did give birth.
Soon after her labour pains began, the Queen was attended by her midwife – Judith Wilkes – and a nurse; next up was Mrs Dawson, who had to be summoned from church as it was Trinity Sunday. Mrs Dawson was a woman of the Bedchamber and a Protestant, so she was supposed to be an impeccable witness. The Queen seemed rather distressed and was sitting on a stool when Mrs Dawson reached the great ‘bed chamber’. She urged Her Majesty to get back into bed – the bed was apparently still warm as the royal couple had spent the night together, a cosy touch.
Neither of James’s daughters was present when the Queen went into labour. Nevertheless, from the first, Mary was certain that her half-brother was ‘suppositious’. This is, of course, a perfect example of sibling rivalry: to believe your brother or sister is a fiction and does not really exist. The fact that the sisters were absent by their own choice did not prevent them from suggesting a baby had somehow been smuggled into the royal bedroom. The Protestants seized on one incident at 8.15 a.m. when a servant – no doubt a papist – was instructed to get a warming pan for the Queen’s bed.
During the next hour, more and more people – men as well as women – crowded into the bedchamber. The audience included the Countess of Sunderland, the Lord Chancellor, almost the entire Privy Council and Catherine of Braganza, Charles II’s widow. Forty-two witnesses were named but there were also pages, servants and priests. If the Guinness World Records had an entry for the most people ever present at a birth, Mary of Modena’s delivery would surely be a contender.