The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain

by Allan Massie

  Four or five days before the king [the young Louis XIV] removed from Paris [on account of the Fronde] I went to visit the Queen of England, whom I found in her daughter’s chamber, who has been since Duchess of Orleans. [This was the youngest child, Henriette-Anne, known in the family as Minette]. At my coming in, she said: ‘You see I am come to keep Henriette company. The poor child could not rise today for want of a fire.’ The truth is that the cardinal [Mazarin, the chief minister] for six months altogether had not ordered her any money towards her pension; that no tradespeople would trust her for anything; and that there was not at her lodgings a single banknote…Posterity will hardly believe that, to get out of bed in the Louvre, and in the eyes of France, a Princess of England, grand-daughter of Henri-Quatre, had wanted a faggot, in the month of January and within sight of the French court.2

  The Cardinal arranged for the Parlement of Paris to provide the Queen of England with money for her subsistence.

  Other royalists were in a like state of destitution. Sir Edward Hyde, the future Earl of Clarendon, now chancellor of the government-in-exile, in his History of the Rebellion wrote: ‘The Marquis of Ormonde was compelled to put himself in prison, with other gentlemen, at a pistole a week for his diet, and to walk the streets a-foot, which was no honourable custom in Paris.’ On the other hand, Lord Jermyn, the Queen’s chamberlain, whom some thought her lover, which is unlikely, was reputed ‘to keep an excellent table for those who courted him, and had a coach of his own’. Eventually, when the troubles of the Fronde were over, Henrietta Maria was better provided for, thanks to the intervention of her sister-in-law Anne of Austria, the widow of Louis XIII and mother of Louis XIV.

  One member of the Stuart family was in a happier condition, materially at least. This was Mary, the Princess Royal. Married to the Prince of Orange, Stadtholder of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, she had the status and security the exiles lacked. Yet she too was not without her discontents and was often low-spirited. The immediate cause was her husband’s frequent and flagrant infidelity. Indeed, his love affairs were so open and notorious that they were made the subject of a play staged in Amsterdam – where republicanism was strong and the Orange family unpopular.3 Mary was devoted to her brothers, especially Charles, as was, to be fair, her husband. She disliked the Dutch and made her distaste evident – which hardly added to the couple’s popularity – and spent a lot of time with her aunt Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth knew more of the pain of exile than anyone else in the family. It was now over thirty years since her husband Frederick had rashly accepted the offer of the crown of Bohemia, been driven out first from Prague and then from his own Palatinate. Frederick had been dead for years, and Elizabeth had lost much of the youthful beauty that had led the diplomat Sir Henry Wotton to call her ‘the eclipse and glory of her kind’. Wotton, remembered for his description of an ambassador as ‘an honest man sent abroad to lie for his country’, immortalised her in verse:

  You meaner beauties of the night,

  That poorly satisfy our eyes

  More by your number than your light,

  You common people of the stars,

  What are you when the moon shall rise?

  For years Elizabeth had depended on a pension from her brother Charles and gifts from her friend and admirer Lord Craven, who had also provided £30,000 towards the cost of an unsuccessful campaign to recover the Palatinate. At the outbreak of the civil war, Parliament, not surprisingly, stopped her pension; thereafter she relied on the kindness of friends and some assistance from the Dutch government. Fortunately she had lots of friends, for her charm was legendary, though not all of her many children were equally captivated by it. Her eldest son was dead, drowned on campaign; she had quarrelled with the second, Charles Louis. Restored to part of the Palatinate by the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), he refused to allow his mother to return with him. Her favourite son, Rupert, was ranging the seas as admiral of the tiny royalist fleet. His brother Maurice, who had accompanied him to England in 1642 to fight for their uncle, was also dead, lost at sea. Four daughters survived to adulthood. Elizabeth, the eldest, an intellectual, friend and correspondent of the philosopher and scientist Leibnitz, would never marry. Henrietta found a husband in a prince of Transylvania. Sophia, having rejected the less than wholehearted advances of her cousin Charles II, married the Elector of Hanover and lived to a great age, her son George becoming King of Great Britain and Ireland in 1714. Louise, who had much of her mother’s charm, though indifferent to her appearance, fell in love with the Marquis of Montrose, who, after the King’s execution, was in no mood for romance; eventually she turned Catholic, entered a convent and died as Abbess of Maubuisson. All the girls were often irritated by their mother, Sophia complaining that her dogs and monkeys mattered more to Elizabeth than did her children. This may well have been true; it is just as likely, however, that they were jealous of the apparently effortless manner in which Elizabeth continued in her fifties to attract admirers. Her spirit seemed indomitable. ‘Though I have cause enough to be sad,’ she wrote to one of her elderly friends, Sir Thomas Roe, ‘yet I am still of my wild humour to be as merry as I can in spite of fortune.’ Like Louise, she adored Montrose, writing letters full of affection, advice and jokes, all of which he was in sore need of. She commissioned his portrait, and hung it in her cabinet ‘to frighten away the Brethren’. She also adored her nephew Charles, relishing his easy manner and dry humour. She might well have been happy to see him marry her daughter.

  In Paris, Henrietta Maria had other, more ambitious plans for her son. He should be wed to a cousin on her side of the family. This was her niece Anne-Marie-Louise de Montpensier, the eldest daughter of Gaston, Duc d’Orleans. As the brother of Louis XIII he was addressed as Monsieur, and his daughter as Mademoiselle. (She is usually known as La Grande Mademoiselle, not only because she was a big woman, but because of her martial exploits on the rebel side during the Fronde.) Mademoiselle had many merits: she was brave and kind-hearted, intensely loyal to her slippery flibbertigibbet of a father and loving to her half-sisters. She was also extremely rich, thanks to the early death of her mother from whom she had inherited vast estates; and this commended her to Henrietta Maria. But she was also naïve, rather stupid, and incapable of seeing a joke, all of which did not commend her to Charles. Besides, unlike his mother, he understood that marrying a Catholic princess, no matter how well born and rich, would do him no good in either England or Scotland. He spoiled his mother’s plans by pretending to Mademoiselle that he spoke no French; she thought him singularly ill-bred. Nevertheless, the comedy went on for some years.

  The Queen’s first attempt to make a match between her son and her niece was launched when he was little more than a boy in Paris in the early years of exile before the King’s execution. Soon the Prince’s time there was enlivened by the arrival of the young Duke of Buckingham and his brother Francis. They had been childhood friends, for King Charles had adopted the Villiers boys a few months after their father’s murder. The Duke, George, was almost three years older than Charles, Francis eighteen months. Both had inherited their father’s beauty, and the Duke was also very clever, endlessly amusing, witty, irreverent, and a wonderful mimic. He had entranced Charles when they were small and would continue to do so almost as long as they lived. Light-minded and utterly untrustworthy, he had only to exercise his charm to be forgiven. Now the two young men were put to study with the philosopher and mathematician Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan, regarded by the few who read it as a cynical apology for despotism. Charles almost certainly was not among its readers, though he formed a respect and affection for Hobbes. Bishop Burnet, however, writing half a century later, believed that Hobbes ‘laid before him his schemes both as to religion and politics, which made a deep and lasting impression on the Prince’s mind’.4 Perhaps. Buckingham was the readier pupil – Hobbes thought him outstandingly intelligent; yet left off teaching him mathematics when he observed him masturbating as his teacher exp
ounded a geometrical theorem.5

  Soon Charles had other interests. Visiting his sister at the Hague in 1648, he met a girl called Lucy Walter. She was the same age as the Prince, only eighteen, the daughter of an impoverished Welsh squire. Her parents had separated when she was still a child, and at the age of fourteen or fifteen she became the mistress of a colonel in Cromwell’s New Model Army, Algernon Sidney, who paid her ‘fifty broad pieces’ to surrender her virtue – a word never used in connection with her again. A couple of years later he tired of her and passed her on to his royalist brother Robert, who in 1648 obligingly yielded her to Prince Charles. ‘Let who’s have her,’ he told the Prince, ‘she’s already sped.’6 The diarist John Evelyn described her as ‘a bold, brown, beautiful but insipid creature’. The first three adjectives were just; ‘insipid’ Lucy certainly wasn’t, unless Evelyn was using the word in some specialised sense. He may simply have meant that she was almost wholly uneducated, barely literate. It wasn’t, however, her mind that attracted men. Charles fell in love with her, no doubt about that. She gave him a son, James, the future Duke of Monmouth, whom he loved more than any other among the fourteen children he sired who survived infancy.

  The relationship with Lucy lasted on and off – more frequently off – for ten years. It ended in recrimination when he employed agents to remove the boy James from her care, and perhaps even in hatred. Lucy declared that they were married, and it is just possible that they went through some sort of ceremony. She claimed to have papers proving it, but convincing documents have never been produced. The matter remains murky. Charles always denied that they had married, but it was in his interest to do so. Some have suggested any marriage would have been illegal, though it is not clear why – especially if it took place after his father’s execution, when as king and head of the family he would not have had to seek permission from anyone to wed. Monmouth may well have believed he was legitimate. His mother had told him so, and later, when he was removed from her, his tutors, a courtier called Thomas Ross and a Catholic convert, Father Goffe, who had previously been one of the King’s Anglican chaplains, encouraged him in the belief, Ross apparently because he was so charmed by the little boy’s beauty and happy temper that he could deny him nothing and was eager to please him in all things. The rumour of the marriage to Lucy would persist to the end of Charles’s life, causing him embarrassment and political difficulty. Sometime in the nineteenth century, Monmouth’s descendant, the Duke of Buccleuch, is said to have come on a paper in the family archives that, if not a forgery, gave credence to the story. He sensibly – if, from the point of view of the historian, irritatingly – threw it into the fire.

  As for Lucy, her lively career, which had included on a brief return to England a stay as a prisoner in the Tower of London, and at least half a dozen lovers after Charles, ended in 1658. According to the memoirs of Charles’s brother James, Duke of York, the cause of death was ‘a disease incident to her profession. She was very handsome,’ he added, ‘with little wit and some cunning.’7 As king, James would send Monmouth to the block, so he may have been prejudiced against Lucy.

  James himself had arrived in France in 1648, making his escape from England disguised as a woman. He was his mother’s favourite child, and made a better impression at the French court than Charles. La Grande Mademoiselle certainly found him more impressive, for he spoke to her in fluent French. ‘Nothing,’ she declared, ‘detracts from a man so much as not being able to converse, and the Duke talked very well.’8 (But then he had no fear that his mother was trying to marry him off to the lady.) Still, with his fair hair, fine complexion, good manners and graceful bearing, he was generally found to be very agreeable. He was allowed to join the French army, showed himself to be very brave, and won the approval of the greatest commander of the day, Marshal Turenne. In these days of his youth, Burnet wrote in his History, James ‘really clouded the king and passed for the superior genius’. This view, however widely held, was mistaken. Though in Burnet’s words ‘candid and sincere’, and intensely loyal to his brother, James was not very bright. A more acute observer than the Bishop remarked: ‘The king could see things if he would; the duke would see things if he could.’

  The last member of the family to arrive in exile was young Henry, Duke of Gloucester, usually called Harry. He was a lively, intelligent and affectionate boy whom everyone seems to have liked. In 1652 Cromwell released him from prison and sent him to the Hague, in the charge of a tutor. He may have done so out of a native kindliness, or because of suggestions that England’s constitutional dilemma might be best solved by making the boy king, subject to the sort of close limitations of power his father had rejected.

  Henrietta Maria was naturally eager to be reunited with her youngest son, whom she hadn’t seen since he was three or four. Charles was reluctant to accede to her demands, because he knew she would try to convert Harry to her Catholic faith. When she promised to refrain from doing so, he gave way and the boy was sent to Paris. Whereupon his mother broke her promise. Charles was furious. Harry was distressed. He remembered how his father, in that last terrible meeting the night before his execution, had adjured him to remain true to the Church of England, and he had also conceived an intense devotion to his brother. On the other hand, starved of female affection for years, with the horrible memory of his father’s words and also of the death from consumption in 1650 of his only companion, his sister Elizabeth, he was delighted to be part of the family again, with his mother and little sister Minette, and anxious to please the Queen. In the end Charles’s will prevailed, as it usually did when he had set his mind to something, and Harry returned to the Hague. He hoped to be a soldier like his brother James. Meanwhile he amused himself with sport, especially tennis. A few years later, in 1658, when money was shorter than usual, it was even rumoured that he was going to earn his keep as a tennis coach. His story is sad, for he died of smallpox a few weeks after his brother’s restoration. Burnet says he had ‘a kind insinuating temper that was generally very acceptable’, and his death was ‘much lamented by all, but chiefly by the King; for he loved him better than the Duke of York, and was never in his whole life seen so much concerned as he was on this occasion’.

  Chapter 13

  Charles II (1649–85): A Merry and Cynical Monarch

  In May 1640, a couple of weeks before his eleventh birthday, Charles, Prince of Wales, was sent in a coach to the House of Lords, the bearer of a letter from his father requesting the two Houses of Parliament to commute the sentence of death passed on Strafford to imprisonment, which, said the King, ‘would be an unspeakable contentment to me’. It was Henrietta Maria’s idea to entrust the mission to the Prince. Surely the sight of the boy coming to plead for his father’s minister would soften the hearts of Strafford’s enemies? She had miscalculated. The letter was refused, returned unopened, and Charles was sent home. This was the first humiliation he had experienced in a hitherto cherished and protected life. He would be compelled to endure many more over the next twenty years. Before he was sixteen, he was an exile, a refugee, dependent on others for mere subsistence.

  In January 1649, when word came that the King was to be put on trial, Charles sent Parliament a letter signed by himself, otherwise blank, along with a note offering to make whatever concessions might be demanded in order to save his father’s life. He got no reply. A few days later he was a king without a kingdom.

  Or perhaps not. The Scots had not been consulted about the King’s trial and sentence. For all but the most extreme Covenanters, it was a breach of the agreement they had made when they handed him over to the English parliament, with the stipulation that no harm should come to his person. Moreover, Charles had been King of Scotland as well as England, and it was their king who had been so barbarously and, in their view, illegally put to death. Accordingly, on 4 February, as soon as the news of the King’s execution reached the Scottish capital, Charles II was proclaimed king by the Chancellor of Scotland, the Earl of Loudoun, at the Merc
at-cross in Edinburgh. A wave of feeling, indignation mixed with loyalty, ran through the land. The indignation was intensified a few weeks later when the Duke of Hamilton, who had led the Engagers so disastrously to defeat at Preston, followed the master he had served so inconsistently and incompetently to the block. Hamilton had been an erratic and ineffective figure. In The Tale of Old Mortality, Scott puts this epitaph for him into the mouth of an old woman: ‘That was him that lost his head at London. Folks said that it wasna a very guid ane, but it was aye a sair loss to him, puir gentleman.’ Nevertheless he was a Scottish nobleman, a descendant of Scottish kings, and the treason with which he had been charged was no treason either to Scotland or its monarch.

  So Scotland offered hope and opportunity to the young Charles II, a better chance certainly than Ireland of regaining his thrones, though his mother with characteristic lack of political sense was urging him to declare himself a Catholic; ‘Only so you can win Ireland,’ she said.

  Yet the hope Scotland offered was of an uncertain nature, for the land and its people were divided and distracted. There were essentially three parties. All were prepared to set up Charles as king, but beyond that their aims were incompatible, and they were moreover riven by personal enmities and distrust.

  Charles had to deal with three parties whose aims were inconsistent even while they proclaimed themselves ready to accept him as king: first, the zealots of the Covenant led by the Marquis of Argyll, who would accept Charles if he in turn would swear by the Solemn League and Covenant and undertake to establish Presbyterianism in England; second, the Engagers, led by John Maitland, Earl of Lauderdale, and Hamilton’s brother and heir, previously Earl of Lanark – the Engagement had split them from the rigid Covenanters, on account of their willingness to dilute the terms of the Solemn League; and third, the royalists, whose chief was Montrose, and who had realised that the Solemn League and Covenant was wrong in principle and futile as practical politics, since it was unacceptable to England and would make co-operation with English royalists impossible. This last party had sense on its side, and was the only one whose loyalty to the new King was unconditional. Unfortunately it was by far the weakest of the three in Scotland, where Montrose himself had been under sentence of death since his campaign in 1644–5 and was consequently, like his king, in exile.