Royal Charles: Charles II and the Restoration

by Antonia Fraser

  At this point the question of the treachery of Sir William Willys, one of the founders of the Sealed Knot, and probably its secret betrayer ever since, reared its ugly head. Obviously Willys could not have acted as a double-agent for quite so long without suspicions being aroused. But the timing of the charges against him in July was particularly bad. An open placard on the subject in London caused every kind of dissension, accusation and counter-accusation to be aired. It was the very worst atmosphere in which to plan, let alone carry out, a complicated rising, depending on co-ordination throughout the country. The King suspended judgement while enquiries were made. The date for his arrival was postponed till August.

  The motives of Willys, an ultra-ambivalent man in an ambivalent time, as well as the extent of his treachery, continue to baffle.8 There was however much soundness in the argument which Willys used against this particular rising: it would unite the common people against the King, rather than causing them to rise on his behalf; especially since it was harvest time, and no sensible man would want to run the risk of starving in the winter, whoever was in power. But the eventual course of the rising showed that, like the Bourbons after the French Revolution, the Royalists in England had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing since their last disastrous concerted effort of 1655.

  Once again the affair went off half-cock. It became popularly known by the name of Sir George Booth, because his force, easily put down by Lambert at Chester, was all that properly featured of the various para-military bodies promised. But Booth himself had not hitherto been a Royalist. Shades of 1655! This time King Charles took himself to Calais, for his impending departure. The Sealed Knot sulked. Rows, not only in England, but also with Hyde abroad, played their damaging role. By 9 September Jermyn was writing to Ormonde that the news from England was ‘not only worse than we looked for, but even as ill as we could have imagined’. About the same date two other Royalists agreed that ‘Hope cleaveth to the bottom of the box, and is not easily shaken out.’9 The only good thing to be noted about the abortive Booth’s rising was that, although the government speedily clapped the leaders in prison, they did not bother with the severe penalties of previous years.

  To that extent, conditions in England were ameliorating. But of course lack of repression can signify lack of threat, as well as lack of confidence. It was a point not lost on contemporary observers.

  *

  King Charles, disillusioned yet again, resolved to seek his fortune in Spain herself. Perhaps he could galvanize that long-promised assistance by his presence. He was unaware that the single man who would play the most crucial part in his restoration had already come to a private conclusion which favoured the return of the monarchy.

  George Monck was a professional soldier, who, being born in 1608, belonged more properly to the generation of King Charles I than to that of his son. Not only had the army been in a large measure his career, but he also took his high standards of order and efficiency from the conventional military ideals. In Scotland, where he not only held down but positively governed the Scots with his Cromwellian army, his rule was both wise and firm. He had not benefited personally from confiscated Royalist and church land in England and had thus no financial stake in the continuation of the Protectorate: Monck had been loyal to Oliver Cromwell. He would have been loyal to Richard too, had he considered that the younger Protector had any capacity for maintaining within England that law and order which he found so precious. As Monck expressed it, ‘Richard forsook himself, else I had never failed my promise to his father or regard to his memory.’ It is the contention of Monck’s latest biographer that in August 1659 Monck had already reached a decision.10 If England was not to dissolve into chaos once more (and Monck of course had both lived and fought through the Civil War), what he thought of as ‘the old order’ – that is, the King in Parliament – must be restored. It would be six months before Monck gave any public sign of this decision: yet in order to explain the suddenness of the events of 1660 one is forced to the conclusion that by the autumn of 1659 not only Monck but also some of the other leaders, and even more of the ordinary people, were in their heart of hearts beginning to explore this possibility.

  For all his age, Monck represented a new type of man. Here was no regicide. Monck had played no part whatsoever in the death of King Charles I. He had not signed the warrant, nor been a member of the High Court of Justice which condemned Charles I. This was important. The feelings of Charles II on the subject of his father’s murder had been passionate and were to remain so. As we shall see, he made no attempt to disguise the fact, and the penalties paid by the regicides after the Restoration were virtually the only area where the incoming King’s vengeance went to work. Even in the dire straits of 1655 Charles refused to meet his cousin the Elector Palatine at Frankfurt, because the Elector had deserted his father. The incident occurred at the theatre, where the English royal party turned on their heels. Afterwards this was considered ‘unnatural strangeness’ on the part of Charles.11 But it showed the depth of his obsession.

  None of this mud could be attached to Monck. Recognizing his potential usefulness, the King had tried without success to make surreptitious contact with him in the summer of 1659 through his brother Nicholas Monck, a clergyman living in Cornwall. Even before Cromwell’s death, Charles had been careful to distinguish Monck from some of his confrères in a memorandum drafted by Hyde, for a letter to be sent to the General: ‘I am confident that George Monck can have no malice in his heart against me, nor hath he done anything against me which I cannot very easily pardon’– it was the latter sentiment which was important. Tentative offers of land, a title even, were made through various intermediaries, including Viscount Fauconberg, a Yorkshire magnate who had married Mary Cromwell, but possessed the diplomatic attribute of making himself indispensable to every regime. By 5 September Nicholas Monck believed that his brother would support a rising of the King’s friends, if it occurred.12

  A rising – that was not the way that George Monck’s mind tended.

  Under the circumstances, King Charles’ foray to the Spanish borders at Fuenterrabia in the winter of 1659 proved unnecessary. At the time, the expedition annoyed and worried Hyde, since 1658 proud possessor of the Lord Chancellor’s Seal. However, as the King more or less jumped on a ship and set sail down the French Atlantic coast, there was not much that Hyde could do about it, except fuss over the prospect of his being captured by an English vessel.

  But this kind of spontaneous gesture of frustration was rare in Charles these days, as is shown by Hyde’s comment that, in the forthcoming negotiations with Spain, he expected the King’s chief assets to be his own ‘dexterity and composedness’. There had been good reports recently of the royal character: people were beginning to be persuaded that the King could conduct his own affairs properly (although Hyde could not resist ending on a familiar note of chiding about his lack of ‘industry’).13 All the same, Hyde put his finger on the King’s problem, one common to heads of state in exile then and now: he had to show himself a potentially wise leader, so that all the advantages of statesmanship should not go to the other side. And he had to do so in a vacuum, or at his own mimic court. At the same time, the King had to keep up the pressures of opposition, acting as a partisan leader to his own followers.

  As it turned out, events at Fuenterrabia were of no particular international significance either way, although the King’s energy and intelligence continued to make a good impression. The Spaniards maintained their reluctance to provide armed support. By this time the news had spread that the English ice was thawing. This put the King’s advisers in a panic. It was suddenly dangerous for the King to seem too dependent upon Spain.

  But the expedition did have one consequence of great importance in the King’s personal life. In December he rediscovered his youngest sister, Henriette-Anne. They had not met for over five years, since the involuntary retreat from France. Charles remembered Henriette-Anne (or Minette, as she was occasionally known)fn2
as a thin little girl living in straitened circumstances with her mother. Henriette-Anne was still physically delicate. Louis XIV rudely described her as looking like the bones of the Holy Innocents when she married his brother. Her fragility was emphasized by the fact that she had one shoulder higher than the other, the relic of her difficult birth during the siege of Exeter. In her youth she acted in a masque at the French Court, and brought tears to the eyes of the spectators with her verse:

  Mon jeune et royal aspect

  Inspire avec le respect

  La pitoyable tendresse.

  For the rest of her short lift, Henriette-Anne never lost that capacity to inspire both pity and tenderness.

  Yet in other ways she had changed and blossomed so much that the court women tricked the King agreeably by introducing the wrong young lady as his sister. It was her brilliant colouring, combined with her doll-like figure, which made Henriette-Anne so captivating. She had bright chestnut hair and eyes of a startling blue (the traditional colouring of the later Stuarts, Charles being the exception). Her teeth, unlike those of so many beauties of the time, were white and regular, and she had a smile of exceptional sweetness. As for her complexion, perhaps her best point, that was termed ‘roses and jasmine’ by a lyrical Madame de Motteville.15

  But the real secret of the enchantment which Henriette-Anne undoubtedly exercised over her contemporaries was in her ability both to give and receive love. A childhood deprived of physical necessities had left her rich in love at least, from her widowed mother. As a result, as the Abbé de Choisy put it, one loved her without thinking one could do otherwise.

  Naturally King Charles fell under her spell. They got on immediately, in spite of the long absence. As brothers and sisters with an enormous age gap (fourteen years in this case) sometimes do, they fell into a relationship which on his side was half-way between that of father and brother. Perhaps on Charles’ side it was even a little lover-like, but all within the safe emotional degrees of the family circle. Their correspondence burst into flower immediately after they parted, proliferating with endearments and little tendernesses of every sort, as though to make up for the lost years. Early on, Charles asked Henriette-Anne not to put so many ‘majesties’ in her letters: ‘for I do not wish that there should be anything between us but friendship’.16

  By now the King’s relationship with his mother was thoroughly soured. Mary in Holland had her own drawbacks of temperament. James had a restricting sense of his position as his brother’s heir: besides, he tended to side with his mother. But with Charles’ ‘dear dear sister’ all was pleasure and lightheartedness, the thrill of discovery and rediscovery. ‘I am yours entirely,’ he ended a letter dated 26 May 1660, written on board the boat which was taking him towards England.17 Charles did not fail to think of Henriette-Anne even in the hour of his glory. It was a portent of the important role she would play as his ambassadress.

  In the memoirs of James II (dealing with his campaigns as Duke of York) the beginning of 1660 was described as the ‘lowest ebb’ of Charles II’s hopes, a time when all his optimism had left him. Yet, when only a few short months had passed, King Charles was to be restored ‘without one drop of bloodshed, to the astonishment of all the Christian world’.18 How did this seemingly amazing reversal come about, a revolution (in the strict seventeenth-century sense of the word, a turnabout) which on the surface astonished everyone by its dramatic arrival? As Samuel Pepys, an up-and-coming young civil servant, noted in the diary which he had only just begun to keep, ‘Indeed it was past imagination both the greatness and the suddenness of it.’19

  The first thing to be noted is that the Restoration of King Charles II was a strictly internal process. Charles was not restored by any of the efforts of the various foreigners whose aid he had sought down all the years of exile, not by the help of Spain, not by the encouragement of France, certainly not by the assistance of the Pope, nor by virtue of Scotland, nor the Scandinavian Kings and Queens, not by the German princes, bishops and Electors, nor the intricate politics of the Dutch. … The manœuvres and prayers of Queen Henrietta Maria, the obstinate but clear principles of Edward Hyde had equally counted for nothing. Nor was that oft-predicted magnificent – and successful – Royalist rising ever destined to take place.

  The final irony of the years of exile lay in the fact that King Charles was in the end restored not for any efforts of his own, but just because the mighty tide of revolution had somehow exhausted itself quite early in the Protectorate. The vast waves of change which had crashed down on English shores had given way to gentler waters. Stability and order had become the concern of almost everyone in the state. That yearning for order had been satisfied by the old Protector, particularly as his successive disillusionments with his Parliaments had revealed him as an increasingly conservative figure. Ever since, a series of experiments had gradually led men of good sense (such as Monck) to think longingly of the old monarchy. None of these experiments had, mercifully, involved the King over the water. He was not contaminated. That was the King’s strong – unconscious – appeal.

  On 1 January 1660 Ormonde told Jermyn that ‘the general disposition of the people … seems to promise great advantages to the king; four parts of five of the whole people besides the nobility and gentry, being devoted to him’.20 For an explanation of this seeming volte face, one cannot do better than quote Milton’s sonorous outcry against the whole topic of restoration: ‘For this extolled and magnified nation, regardless both of honour won, or deliverances vouchsafed from heaven, to fall back or rather creep back … to their once abjured and detested thraldom of kingship!’ It was true. England did fall back – or perhaps creep back is the more accurate term.

  Did King Charles himself then play no part at all in these stirring events? Was he merely a royal puppet, twitched on a string held by mightier hands than his own – including the strongest hand of all, the hand of Fate? First it must be said that Charles, who had shown himself far from deficient in those qualities which compel admiration in a monarch such as courage, resilience and tenacity, was not directly invited back as a result of them. But this is not to deny the King participation in his own triumph. On the contrary, the character of the King was of extreme importance to the whole question of the Restoration. But it was of negative importance.

  He did not scupper his own cause. And in this he did better than many a royal or political exile before or since.

  Thomas Clifford, later the King’s minister, noted in his commonplace book under the heading ‘Reputation’: ‘The reputation of his Majesty was more instrumental for his restoration than an army.’ Yet how many hidden rocks and shoals had existed in the years of exile on which King Charles II might well have wrecked both the reputation of the monarchy and his own! Foremost amongst these was certainly the charge of Catholicism. His strenuous efforts to maintain his Protestant reputation have been noted. It was King Charles’ personal reward that, for example, in March 1660 the Puritan divine Richard Baxter was convinced of it: the King, having been born and duly educated in the true religion, had ‘never departed from the public profession of it’. And this, after years in France and the Spanish Netherlands, gleefully described by the Commonwealth propagandist Marchamont Nedham as ‘the most jesuited place in the world’, was no mean feat.21

  Had the charge been made to stick, it is possible that the claims of Henry Duke of Gloucester to the throne might have been considered (the Duke of York’s religion was already in doubt). But that would have brought with it a number of consequences, including a rift in the Stuart royal family. Moreover, Henry would have ascended the throne, not as Charles did, free and unencumbered by promises, but already fettered – as a compromise candidate is always fettered. The whole character of the Restoration would have been altered.

  Secondly, King Charles played the foreign hand as best he could, so that no positively disastrous charges of foreign intervention could be made against him. It is true that luck as well as judgement featured here. King
Charles, as we have seen, was never averse to the assistance of either the French or the Spanish or the Dutch: but even in his lowest moments he was not prepared to make those sacrifices, such as a change in his religion, which could conceivably have swayed these powers. In this the influence of Hyde, ever aware of the dangers, was prominent. But that strange streak of vacillation, or masterly inaction, or sheer intrigue, depending on your point of view, which began to develop in an otherwise straightforward character in exile, also helped. It is a quality which will emerge more pronouncedly after the Restoration.

  Thirdly, the King did not allow himself to be painted as either very debauched, or very extravagant, or very wild, or very inattentive to business, with impunity. Most of these charges were made at one time or another, mainly by government propagandists. But they could not be made to stick. It was possible to regard King Charles II, on 1 January 1660, as a decent, serious man. He was no saint certainly, as princes seldom were, but past his first youth, without too many peccadilloes to be overlooked, too much dissipation to be forgiven. He was after all in his thirtieth year. Yet once again, what opportunities of debauchery, founded on despair, an exile might have offered!

  Fourthly, in public at least, King Charles II was never seen to commit the sin of despair. And that was his most important contribution to his own return.

  Early in 1660 there were visible fissures in the surface of England. On 1 January Monck marched from Scotland, not only in search of pay for his woefully deprived men, but also with the avowed intention of restoring the sovereignty of Parliament. When he reached London, he forced the Rump Parliament to admit to its ranks a number of members hitherto excluded for political reasons. That was the first step. But in any form, however liberal, the hated Rump could not last long.