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

by Allan Massie

  A few days later Charles arrived in Paris and had to borrow a clean shirt. His mother was delighted to see him safe, but told him he would have to pay for his own dinner, since she couldn’t afford to do so.

  His weeks on the run provided him with a story that he would tell, again and again, for the rest of his life. It fascinated those who heard it for the first time. On the ship bringing Charles back to England in 1660 the young Samuel Pepys was enthralled when granted the privilege of hearing of the King’s adventures. Twenty years later he recorded the story again at Charles’s dictation. Those closer to the King soon found the repetition of the narrative to be an appalling bore. But at first everyone was astonished that a king should have had to undergo such experiences. In conversation with Hyde, however, Charles did not conceal that he had sometimes come close to despair. ‘I thought that I was paying too high a price for my life.’ He added that he owed most to the persecuted Catholics, without whose help he must surely have been taken.10

  The years that followed were often wretched, full of disappointments. Charles was impoverished, living from hand to mouth, surrounded by men who were themselves frequently lonely, disgruntled and quarrelsome. Projects for royalist risings were brought before him. He encouraged few of them, knowing how little chance they had of success. He watched Cromwell win the respect of European monarchs while he himself was disregarded or insulted, at best employed as an expendable pawn on the diplomatic chessboard. According to the moves of that game, he was at various times made to realise he was unwelcome in France and the Netherlands, and compelled to move on. Cromwell’s spies infiltrated his household. Some of his followers made their peace with the dictator. Buckingham, for instance, contrived to return safely to England, where he married Fairfax’s daughter, lived off his father-in-law, and posed as a reformed and pious character, acquiring merit among the Independents. To please his new friends, he would say that Charles had shown himself a coward at Worcester. All this came to Charles’s ears and was bitter to hear. Nevertheless, he would forgive the Duke; he wasn’t a man with whom Charles could ever be angry for long. Sooner or later Buckingham would jest himself back into favour.

  The King’s character was formed in these years of exile – more accurately, it was deformed. The blithe and affectionate boy became a hardened cynic, taking pleasure where he might find it. Women came easily to him, and he took them as he found them, but none since Lucy Walter captured his heart. The bitterness with which he pursued her in his attempt to get possession of their son was unlike his behaviour to any other of the many women in his life; evidence that she alone had the ability to hurt him, that perhaps she was the only one he ever truly loved. Now, in his cynical disillusion, masked only by perfect manners, he reserved his affection for the children in the family – his son James, Harry of Gloucester, Minette, William the little Prince of Orange – and his spaniels. None of them plagued him with impossible demands or presented him with impractical plans; none had let him down.

  Cromwell died in September 1658. (At the French court La Grande Mademoiselle was the only person to refuse to wear mourning in honour of the dictator.) There was great excitement among the royalists, but this soon died down and was replaced by frustration, for Richard Cromwell took his father’s place as Lord Protector. Richard, however, was in office, but not in power. The army had no respect for him, and he soon gave way and retired into private life. The remnant of the old 1640 Parliament, the Rump, was recalled, amidst general derision, expressed in London by a craze for roasting the rumps of cattle, sheep and pigs. General Monk, who had himself been a Cavalier before he was a Roundhead, marched his army from Scotland, and, after much hesitation and sounding of opinion, summoned what was known as a free parliament, elected by the traditional constituencies. By now it was evident in which direction the tide was running, and the parliament, at Monk’s request, appointed commissioners to go to the Netherlands and bring the King back. Charles meanwhile had issued a declaration, drawn up by Hyde, in which he promised to defend the Protestant religion. There should be ‘liberty of conscience, and a free and general pardon for political offences’.

  In these weeks before the offer of restoration was made, Charles had maintained an appearance of impassivity. It was as if he dared not trust his luck. But at last all was confirmed. General Monk had declared for him; so had Parliament and so had the navy, whose commander, Montagu (later Earl of Sandwich), was deputed to bring him home. So rapid had been the transformation that the ship in which Montagu sailed was still called the Naseby; it would soon be renamed the Royal Charles. Once aboard, the King became animated. He could not keep still but walked the deck and talked and talked. (It was now that he told Pepys the story of his adventures after Worcester.)

  They landed at Dover, where Monk awaited them. Charles, dressed in a new dark-coloured suit, but with a scarlet plume in his hat, took Monk in his arms, kissed him on both cheeks, and called him ‘Father’. York also kissed him and young Harry Gloucester threw his hat in the air and called out, ‘God bless General Monk.’ In a few days Monk would be made Duke of Albemarle, and his dumpy wife, Bess, who had once worked as a washerwoman, a happy duchess. Now the Mayor of Dover presented Charles with a Bible. ‘It is the thing I love above all things in the world,’ the King said.

  They paused at Canterbury, where Charles invested Monk with the Order of the Garter, and found time before he went to bed to write a little note to his darling Minette. ‘Monk, with a great number of the nobility almost overwhelmed me with kindness and joy for my return. My head is so dreadfully stunned with the acclamations of the people that I know not whether I am writing sense or nonsense.’

  On the afternoon of 29 May, which happened to be his thirtieth birthday, Charles entered London by way of Blackheath, and rode past Temple Bar, along the Strand to Westminster, where the two Houses of Parliament were assembled to receive him. John Evelyn, watching the procession make its way along the Strand, was amazed: ‘And all this without one drop of blood, and by that very Army that rebelled against him. Such a Restoration was never seen in the mention of any history, not so joyful a day and so bright.’11

  Charles came to Whitehall and paused by the gateway of the banqueting hall, looking up at the window from which his father had stepped out to the scaffold. Then he met the parliamentarians, and after their loyal and adulatory addresses, he gave utterance to the most honest words he had spoken that crowded day: ‘The laws and liberties of my people and the Protestant religion – next to my life and crown – I will preserve.’ Few probably caught the full significance of the words ‘next to my life and crown’, but in them Charles gave vent to the one principle he would maintain throughout his reign: his determination never – no matter what happened – to go on his travels again.

  A little later, in the palace, he looked round the assembled throng and smiled: ‘I doubt it has been my own fault I have been absent for so long – for I see nobody that does not protest he has ever wished for my return.’ He paused, to allow the embarrassed laughter to die away, and then, striking the note of irony still more clearly, asked, ‘Where are all my enemies?’

  The King was back, but the restored monarchy was that of 1641, not 1640. The measures passed in the first year of the Long Parliament that had been granted royal approval, however reluctantly, were not rescinded. The prerogative courts, those instruments by which the Tudors and the first two Stuarts had been able to practise authoritarian government, had been abolished, and were not revived. The principle that taxation required the consent of Parliament was firmly established. The right to those old feudal dues by means of which Charles I had so vexatiously raised extra-parliamentary revenue was surrendered. In exchange, Parliament guaranteed the King an income (mostly from customs and excise), which regularly amounted to £1,200,000 a year. (It was never enough till, in the last years of the reign, a trade boom brought in more than expected.) Divine right was dead, even though the Church of England clergy now taught that it was sinful to resist th
e royal pleasure. Nevertheless, the fact remained that, though Charles was king by hereditary right, he had been recalled to the throne by his people, and his survival required that he should never forget the significance of the civil war and his father’s trial, condemnation and death.

  He had promised indemnity for his enemies, and that promise was for the most part kept, an exception being made only for the regicides, those who had signed the warrant for the King’s execution. (Even so, some escaped death, among them Henry Marten, who had shocked Hyde so long ago by questioning the right of any single person to govern the country.) Compromise was necessary, for those who had effected the restoration were servants of the republic. So, for instance, royalists whose estates had been confiscated regained them, but those who had sold them, whether from financial necessity or by compulsion, did not. The new parliament, though composed largely of Cavaliers and Church of England men, was induced to pass an Act of Indemnity and Oblivion; ‘Indemnity for the King’s enemies and oblivion for his friends,’ some said bitterly. There was to be no purge.

  Yet the Cavalier Parliament, as it was to be called, took its revenge in its own manner. A series of acts were passed that severely restricted the freedom of those who were now known as Dissenters or Nonconformists – Presbyterians and Independents. The Cavalier squires had been frightened and humiliated, and were determined to take care that their enemies should be afflicted in their turn, and their own supremacy confirmed by law. This was not to the King’s taste. In matters of religion he was indifferent. He once told Burnet that he was no atheist, but did not think God would damn a man for taking a little pleasure. Nor were these acts approved by the chancellor, Hyde (now made Earl of Clarendon), though historians were to give them the name of the Clarendon Code; good Anglican though he was, he had too much sense.

  There was a new mood in the country. After the discord of the civil war and the moral rigour of the republic, it was a time for licence. The King himself set the tone: ‘Cuckolds all awry, the old dance of England.’ He spent the first nights of his reign in bed with the luscious Barbara Palmer, wife of a Cavalier squire. Their liaison would last a dozen years; Barbara would bear him five children and become, successively, Lady Castlemaine and Duchess of Cleveland. Neither was faithful, nor demanded fidelity, though Barbara might be jealous of rivals. Her own lovers included a celebrated tight-rope dancer, Jacob Hall, whom she had picked up at Bartholomew Fair, and a young officer, John Churchill, scarcely out of his teens. On one occasion, when the King knocked at his mistress’s door, Churchill had to gather his clothes and leap out of the window. On another, Charles caught the pair ‘in flagrante delicto’, but forgave Churchill because, he said, ‘you are a rascal but you do it for your bread’. Barbara was extravagant and ill-tempered, fond of making scenes, something the King detested; so he generally gave way to avoid them or calm her.

  A rival to Lady Castlemaine appeared. This was Frances Stewart, whose grandfather, Walter Stewart (later Lord Blantyre), had been a schoolfellow of James VI, subjected like him to the stern discipline and sharp tongue of George Buchanan. Later he had been Lord Treasurer of Scotland, and one of the commissioners charged with drawing up plans for the complete union of Scotland and England. Frances had been brought up in France and spoke French better than English. Recognising the challenge she posed, Lady Castlemaine made a friend of the newcomer, inviting her to all her entertainments and often keeping her overnight, so that when the King made his regular morning call on his mistress, he often found the two beauties in bed together. ‘It was hardly possible,’ Anthony Hamilton wrote of Frances, ‘for a woman to have had less wit or more beauty…She was childish in her behaviour, and laughed at everything, and her taste for frivolous amusements, though unaffected, was only allowable in a little girl of about twelve or thirteen years old…“Blind man’s buff” was her most favourite amusement’12 – but she was also very fond of building card houses. Nevertheless, she had wit enough to hold the King off,13 and eventually married the Duke of Lennox and Richmond, a grandson of James VI’s cousin and favourite, Esmé Stuart. Her beauty attracted praise from all, and was such that she sat for the King’s engraver of the Mint and was represented as the figure of Britannia on the copper coinage.

  Meanwhile the King had married. His bride was Catherine of Braganza, a Portuguese princess with little but her birth and dowry (which included the gift of the city of Tangier) to recommend her. She was a devout Roman Catholic, spoke no English on her arrival and never learned the language properly. Her eating habits were said to be disagreeable. She played little part in the life of the court, was never suspected of infidelity, and failed in the principal duty of queens, which is to produce an heir. Nobody could doubt, given the frequency with which the King’s mistresses gave birth, that the incapacity was hers. In time she fell in love with Charles, as most women did, and he displayed a tolerant affection for her. She loathed, and probably feared, Lady Castlemaine.

  The theatres, closed down by the Puritans, had reopened, and for the first time women appeared on the professional stage. The King delighted in plays, as did so many of his subjects, among them the amorous Pepys. Nobody then expected virtue of actresses – old-fashioned folk thought them little better than common prostitutes – and the King was not long in finding that the stage could supply him with lovers every bit as agreeable as might be found at court. There was, for example, Moll Davis, whose singing of ‘wild and mad songs’ charmed the King. She held his affections for some time, a daughter who was to marry the Earl of Derwentwater being born in 1673.

  More famous than Moll Davis was the cockney girl Nell Gwyn. She was said to have been born in a night-cellar, to have sold oranges at Covent Garden (or alternatively to have hawked baskets of fish round the streets), to have wandered from tavern to tavern amusing the company by her songs, before going on the stage, where she excelled in comic parts. She was light-hearted, gave herself no airs and was, according to Burnet, ‘such a constant diversion to the king, that even a new mistress could not drive her away’. Castlemaine made scenes, but Nell made Charles laugh, which was the secret of her hold on him.

  The years of exile had promoted a strong family feeling, though Charles had found his mother intensely irritating; and the Restoration promised them all a scarcely looked-for happiness. But Harry Gloucester died of the smallpox in 1661, and his elder sister Mary, the Princess of Orange, of the same disease shortly afterwards. Elizabeth of Bohemia returned to the England she had left on the occasion of her marriage half a century ago, and her favourite child, Prince Rupert, the King’s boyhood hero, came back too. But Elizabeth died in 1662, and Rupert, an amateur scientist, preferred his laboratory to the frivolity of the court; he too took up with an actress, Margaret Hughes, said to be the first woman to have played the part of Desdemona in Othello, with whom he had a daughter, Ruperta. The adored Minette was still in France, married to Louis’s brother Philippe, Duc d’Orleans. It was not a happy marriage. Monsieur, effeminate, bejewelled, wearing high heels (for he was very short) and rouging his cheeks, was in love with the Chevalier de Lorraine rather than his wife, while Minette engaged in a flirtation with Louis, till she realised his target was one of her ladies-in-waiting, a charming girl called Louise de la Vallière, whose religious scruples did not permit her to surrender her virtue to the King till her confessor assured her it was her duty to do so.

  Of the brothers and sisters only James, Duke of York, was left in London, and he was giving trouble. He had got the chancellor’s daughter, Anne Hyde, pregnant, and, as a well-brought-up girl, she was holding out for marriage. Henrietta Maria came hurrying over from France to try to put a stop to this unsuitable match; apart from Anne not being royal, the Queen had long detested Clarendon and had had many fierce arguments with him during the years of exile. As it happened, Clarendon himself was appalled. But Charles, perhaps with a touch of mockery, insisted his brother do the right thing: marry the girl, or, since she claimed they were already wed, own up to the marriage.
So it went ahead, and James might indeed have done much worse, for Anne was a sensible woman. They had two daughters, Mary and Anne, and things might have gone better for James if she had not died in 1671.

  Almost from the day of the King’s return, his court acquired a reputation for debauchery and dissipation. In August 1661, Samuel Pepys, who had not yet shaken off his Puritan upbringing, thought that ‘things are in very ill condition, there being so much emulation, poverty, and the vices of drinking, swearing and loose amours, that I know not what will be the end of it but confusion’. But for young men and women from a less severe background, it was a merry place, and these were wonderful times. In any case it is hard to blame the returned exiles for revelling in the long-hoped-for but scarcely expected turn of fortune.

  The King seemed idle. He often was idle, preferring to chat with his mistresses or play with his spaniels, to stroll in St James’s Park, play tennis or ride at Newmarket, rather than attend to the business of government. But he had his serious side too. He cared deeply for the condition of the navy, as did York, Lord High Admiral, to whom little Mr Pepys had attached himself at the beginning of a career that would see him become an exemplary, honest and industrious civil servant. Charles was no aesthete like his father, but he took more than a layman’s intelligent interest in science. In the last years of the republic, a group of learned men and amateurs had formed the habit of meeting to discuss scientific matters. Charles was interested in their work, gave them his patronage, and the Royal Society was incorporated in 1662. The King became a member, joining Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, Earl of Cork, who defined the chemical element as an entity that could not be decomposed into constituents, and a little later, the greatest scientist of the age, Isaac Newton. Some of the members, such as Prince Rupert, John Aubrey and indeed Pepys, who was elected a fellow in 1664, might be fairly described as dilettanti (though Pepys was to be the Society’s president in 1684); but the foundation of the Royal Society may be accounted one of the most notable and important acts of Charles’s reign.