Royal Charles: Charles II and the Restoration

by Antonia Fraser

  He preferred positive memorials to his father: as late as 1678 the House of Commons voted £70,000 for a funeral and a monument for the murdered King, a quite incredible sum. Perhaps it was too incredible: for the money never arrived, although Wren did produce a design for a monument.fn2 But it was the measure of the King’s forgiveness that by a decade after his Restoration he was accepting hospitality from Henry Cromwell, second son of the late Protector, at his home near Newmarket.

  Nevertheless, in Charles II a temperamental disinclination to vengeance was not at all the same thing as an inclination to forget the past. Revolution, and its possible consequences, was one spectre which stalked the corridors of the King’s palace from the inception of his reign to its end (even though this spectre would take different guises in different decades). But at no point was the presence of such a threatening ghost felt more acutely than in the early 1660s. To understand this, one has to be wary of hindsight. Not to the monarch riding down towards Whitehall on 29 May was there granted the cheerful knowledge that he would die in his bed twenty-five years later. On the contrary, he arrived in a country in desperate need of settlement, coming from a Europe in which the tide of revolution, flowing strongly in 1648, was only just beginning to subside. Like his first cousin Louis XIV, Charles had been formed against a background of such experiences.

  Thus one finds the implicit fear of another revolution expressed continuously and in all sorts of different ways in the early years of the reign. There were significant details such as the preference for Windsor Castle as a royal fortress, not simply because it was ‘the most romantique castle that is in the world’, but because it could be properly garrisoned.16 There were broader policies, such as the concentration on forming a proper body of guards to surround the monarch. Richard Cromwell, exiled and debt-ridden, was clearly a burnt-out case: yet it was considered worth while reporting on his movements. A general jumpiness animated surveys of the careers of those with regicide connections.

  Still more important is it to realize that in the early years plots were not only feared, but actually existed. Periodically substance was given to these apprehensions; otherwise they might have dissolved in the growing stability of the Restoration state. In January 1661, for instance, the Fifth Monarchy men, members of a millenarian sect, ran amok under a Thomas Venner; the later plots of 1663 and 1664 led to the production of diligent if circumstantial reports on the subversive activities of republicans, Quakers, and other sectaries. The year 1663 also produced quite a serious republican plot in Ireland; similar disturbances in Scotland evoked from Pepys the nervous reaction that the Bishops’ Wars might be happening all over again – tremors which demonstrate how finely balanced popular stability was considered to be in the early years of the reign. During the Dutch War there were genuine conspiracies in London, to give colour to royal and other fears.

  The fatal years after 1640 had left their curse behind: never again could revolution be unimaginable. Not only had Charles himself suffered the strong marks of an impressionable child, but nearly all his current ministers had been sufficiently active to have retained potent memories of republicanism – from one angle or the other. One of the King’s little jokes commemorated the fact, pleasantly but pointedly: he told the former Commonwealth commanders in his splendid new Navy that ‘they all had had the plague but they were quite sound now and less accessible to the disease than others’.17

  As to the absurdity of such fears – that the surviving regicides, aided by the soldiery, plus some new republicans, might overthrow the Crown once more – this was not so striking at the time. In May 1664 the French Ambassador, an intelligent observer, wrote that it did not seem impossible that the English would ‘be tempted again to try and taste a Commonwealth’, remembering their greatness under Cromwell.18

  King Charles II made his own position on the subject clear in his speech to Parliament of February 1663. Referring to certain ‘rogues’ who had escaped punishment recently for want of legal evidence, including William Stockdale, MP, he said, ‘But let him not believe it, although he creates just the same stirs as were prepared before the Long Parliament, that I, knowing the mischiefs then, will not prevent them now.’ The King went on to say that ‘justice I see must be done against such restless spirits, and let them not delude themselves into a belief to find me tame’.19

  The glorious twenty-ninth of May, then, ushered in an age of anxiety as well as an age of rejoicing.

  Yet with these twin provisos of watchfulness against the repetition of revolution and concern for justice to his father’s memory, King Charles II arrived in a healing mood. ‘At which Time he prov’d himself the Noah’s Dove, that finding no Rest anywhere, was receiv’d again into his own Ark, and brought a peaceable Olive-Leaf in his mouth’– thus Titus Britannicus.20 And the sentiments were not exaggerated. In his determined mercy, King Charles in 1660 did show himself indeed a veritable olive-branch-bearing dove. The only trouble was that to bear the olive-leaf involved another twin pair of considerations: conciliation and reward. One or the other he might have achieved: the conciliation of the Cromwellians, the reward of the exiled and wounded Royalists. To do both was likely to prove very difficult, if not impossible. Nevertheless, the King set out with the highest intentions.

  Let us start with reward, the implementation of those hopes whose existence had been so vital to the maintenance of morale during the exile. The loyal petitions began to flood in at once: in fact, many of them had already been received before the King’s arrival, and throughout May Hyde had been deluged with petitions for peerages, ecclesiastical preferments and the like. How many of these petitions related to Worcester! It was not only the King who looked back to that fearful time. One Mary Graves petitioned for having provided twelve steeds: one of these, she was reliably informed, had been shot down from beneath the King during the battle and ‘the other I heard was that happy horse His Majesty got from Worcester upon….’ Less romantic were the drapers of Worcester who had been commanded to clothe the life guard in red cloth and had never been paid; they wanted £450.21

  Sir Jonathan Wiseman of Glastonbury spoke for many when he wrote of himself in semi-biblical language: ‘Your poor petitioner hath been tost and tumbled up and down and was hated of all men, and was tried eleven times for my life, and was imprisoned but still got away….’ And then there were those, not a few, who had served Charles I, such as the poignant story of the dead King’s cannoneer, who had lost both his eyes and his arms in service. In general, the Stuarts remembered their old servants. Poignant memories were aroused by some pensions granted. Four women cradle-rockers to ‘our late dear sisters’ the Princesses Elizabeth (dead at Carisbrooke) and Anne (dead as a baby) were rewarded, as well as those who had served Charles I and even James I.22

  It was of course one of the penalties of the unopposed Restoration that very few names could legitimately be struck off the list. Sir William Killigrew, a royal servant who understood the ways of the world (he also wrote plays), had foreseen this in April: ‘Suppose, Sir, that you were now called in without any restrictions. How impossible a work it would be to please all those that have really served your father, and yourself … ’tis not your three kingdoms that will afford half enough places, or employments for them all.’23

  There was another problem. Through all these petitions and the Restoration settlement itself, we can discern the obsession of the loyal not only that they should, understandably, be rewarded, but less attractively, that the disloyal should not. The point was made early on concerning the composition of the King’s entourage: ‘It is observed by your Majesty’s said royal party, that all those who were the greatest actors both against your royal father and yourself are the only men who are preferred to the highest places of authority and trust about your Majesty,’ ran one petition. Later Rochester the cynical put the same point as he sneered:

  His father’s foes he does reward…

  Never was any King endued

  With so much grace and g
ratitude.

  When Sir Richard Fanshawe, who had been promised by Charles a post as a Secretary of State, was passed over for Monck’s protégé, William Morrice, he expostulated that he had been slighted in favour of ‘one that never saw the King’s face’.24

  The Morrice incident summed up the King’s difficulties in a nutshell. After the happy ending of the Restoration, he had to go forward and reconstruct the government of the country, and former foes were vitally important for the kind of healing settlement he had in mind. His attitude to the scientist Sir William Petty was characteristic. At the Restoration, Petty felt it necessary to explain that his involvement with the government of Ireland during the Commonwealth and Protectorate (including his celebrated survey of the country) had not been done out of any desire to harm the monarchy. ‘But the King, seeing little to mind apologies, as needless, replied: “But, Doctor, why have you left off your inquiries into the mechanics of shipping?”’ And the conversation quickly passed to such agreeable (to the King) topics as loadstones, guns, the feathering of arrows, the vegetation of plants and the history of trade.25

  The first body of men who surrounded the King was indeed a combination of the old and the new (for all the complaints of the loyal petitioner quoted above). It was of course dominated by the trusted counsellor Hyde and the veteran Sir Edward Nicholas, who was given the other secretaryship of State. The Marquess of Ormonde was made Lord Steward of the Household to compensate for the fact that Parliament had appointed Monck Lord Lieutenant of Ireland – although the following year Ormonde was restored to the post for which, as a man who loved and cared for the country, he was so well equipped; he was also given a dukedom. But the Lord Treasurer was to be the Earl of Southampton, a magnate who, if he had had no truck with the Protectoral government, had not shared the exile either; and, even more significantly, his nephew, Anthony Ashley Cooper, who had been a member of the republican Council of State, was made Chancellor of the Exchequer. This group formed, in Hyde’s words, ‘a secret committee’.

  Beyond them lay the Privy Council, numbering between forty and fifty. Beyond that lay Parliament, once again two-housed. What were its powers? For that matter, what was its relation to the monarchy? What indeed were the powers of the monarchy? It was one of the remarkable consequences of the King’s unconditional Restoration that in spite of years of argument, civil war, discussion and experiment, no one in 1660 yet had a clear idea as to what the proper answers to these questions were.

  In so far as an accepted theory existed, it gave the King wide powers. Although the whole Restoration was based on an optimistic feeling that the King and Parliament would in future amicably share power, there was absolutely no indication as to how this was to be worked out in practice. In the meantime, the King retained his prerogative untouched, and with it the right to prorogue or dissolve Parliaments at will, to control foreign policy and, when necessary, to wage war. As against this, Parliament, it was understood, would vote him the extra monies he might need for such matters, since he was no longer expected to ‘live of his own’ (and even the mediaeval Kings had sought money from Parliament to wage war). But the potential control of Parliament over the King inherent in this situation had no theoretical base to it. It was all very confusing.

  In 1664 the French Ambassador commented disapprovingly of the English constitution that it had a monarchical appearance, as there was a king ‘but at the bottom it is very far from being a monarchy’. He questioned whether this confusion was caused by ‘the fundamental laws of the kingdom’ or by the ‘carelessness of the king’.26 In fact, neither was responsible. The confusion developed out of the peculiar circumstances of the Restoration settlement, which presented the King with, on the one hand, very wide powers, and, on the other hand, equally wide problems, which he could not solve without the co-operation of almost everyone in the State.

  It was a measure of the uncertainty of the times that the moment was not felt appropriate for a general election. Although the sitting House of Commons had not been elected legally (they lacked the King’s writ), they were confirmed in their existence, and kept there till December to carry out all the vital post-Restoration legislation. This Convention Parliament thus passed a general Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, from which only fifty named individuals were excepted. The King put the argument for such a measure cogently: ‘It will make them [the former rebels] good subjects to me and good friends and neighbours to you [the loyalists] and we shall have them all our end….’27

  Equally important was the settlement of the Army. A measure was passed to the effect that Commonwealth salaries need not be repaid – this reassured General Monck, amongst others – while of course the Act of Indemnity affected the soldiers as much as any section of the community. At the same time, King Charles took a prudent decision to alter the entire composition of the future Army.

  Disbanding the old Cromwellian soldiers at considerable financial cost, he welded together by degrees a totally new kind of force out of his former Royalist regiments and whatever military elements in England were indubitably loyal. He retained, for example, the Coldstream Guards, who were a Cromwellian creation. It was, to be frank, the first English standing army – in the sense of a non-political military body in support of the civil power. But considerable effort was made to camouflage the fact: references wee made to ‘guards’ and ‘garrisons’ rather than to the dreaded word ‘army’. And the King’s army was incidentally a convenient source of reward for that other army – of needy place-seekers.

  Where the law was concerned, conciliation was more obvious, innovation less apparent. The vital principle was established that service during the Interregnum should be no disqualification: thus both Sir Matthew Hale and Edward Atkins, who had been esteemed judges under Cromwell, were reappointed, and as a result even Bishop Burnet credits Charles with good judges. Furthermore, the judges were for the most part appointed to the more liberal formula of quamdiu se bene gesserit – so long as they conducted themselves properly, rather than the more autocratic durante bene placito – so long as it pleased the King to appoint them.28

  There was one area where public innovation simply could not be avoided, and yet conciliation of all parties was absolutely vital, and that was the vexed area of religion. The question of what sort of State church should exist in England after the Restoration was, like the constitution itself, left wide open at Charles’ return. The promises given at Breda had however been generous in scope. For the rest of 1660 the omens for some tolerant kind of establishment, allowing for both nonconformist and Catholic dissent, looked more hopeful than they would again for two centuries. The King was by temperament, conviction, and (by the implications of his word at Breda) personally inclined to toleration. As he had told Morrice from Breda, he was confident that he had ‘offered nothing’ in his Declaration and letters ‘that I will not meet punctually and exactly perform’.29 The Puritans who had recently ruled the State church knew that some severe alteration in their position was inevitable after his return. Nonconformists, like the Quakers, were petitioning for a situation by which they could rest within the State – peacefully rather than turbulently as hitherto.

  On 25 October 1660 the King issued a declaration in favour of a modified episcopacy, which it was understood that the Presbyterians would also accept. Secretary Morrice offered that this declaration should be embodied in a bill, but this solution, most unfortunately, even tragically, was rejected by the Commons in November. A conference then met at the lodgings of the Bishop of London to work out the details of a compromise by which some Presbyterians could accept preferment.30 It was a defeat, not only for moderation and toleration (leading the way to the much harsher Clarendon Code), but also for the King’s own plan for the English Church. He had taken much interest in the conference, attending it personally. He listened while general concessions were discussed but finally abandoned because the Catholics might benefit. Throughout he held firmly to that view which he had never abandoned in exile, that the An
glican Church represented the right solution for England. He spoke movingly of the Book of Common Prayer: ‘the best we have seen, and we believe that we have seen all that are extant and used in this part of the world….’31

  Carlyle denounced the Restoration settlement in his usual fine splenetic style; he took the body of Oliver Cromwell hanging from Tyburn to be ‘a fingerpost’ into ‘very strange country and far from the government of God. It called and thought itself a Settlement of brightest hope and fulfilment,’ he wrote, ‘bright as the blaze of universal tar-barrels and bonfires could make it: and we find it now, on looking back on it with the insight which trial has yielded, a Settlement as of despair.’ But the despair did not come from the abandonment of Puritanism, as Carlyle fondly believed; it arose through the failure of the English Parliament in 1660 to follow their King’s admirable lead in promoting an established Anglican Church, with the ability to tolerate other law-abiding sects in the wings of its many mansions.

  The land settlement was in general more successful than the religious settlement, because here the status quo could be, and was, respected – except in the case of Crown and Church lands – even at the cost of the Royalists: it has been established that surprisingly little land actually changed hands at the Restoration. The Crown and Church lands were successfully restored, despite the conflict of interest with those who had acquired them, as a result of the successful manœuvres of Hyde and the King.32 This was partly due to the fact that the sequestered Royalists had retained ownership of their forfeited lands more than was lawful by making it over to trustees or relatives; but it was also the innate wish of Parliament and King not to disturb England, as she was, more than was absolutely necessary to bring about justice. And in the view of some Royalists of course the justice brought about was rough indeed.