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

by Allan Massie

  Charles might dislike business, prefer to pose as a flaneur, and for the first years of the reign leave most of it in Clarendon’s capable hands; he might dismiss criticism with a jest and when presented with Rochester’s14 mock epitaph – ‘Here lies our Sovereign Lord the King, / Whose word no man relies on; / Who never said a foolish thing / And never did a wise one’ – lightly acknowledge its truth with the quip that his words were his own, but his acts were his minsters’; but in reality he had perfected a technique that suited his harshly acquired habit of dissimulation. Always approachable, always affable, apparently living for pleasure, idling the hours away, he concealed a powerful will, a shrewd determination to have his own way, and a distrust of Church and Parliament. Even his contempt for religious or political enthusiasm was expressed with a sunny irony. Only occasionally did the mask slip, but even then he usually lied his way out of trouble.

  Much routine business might be neglected; it bored him. But foreign policy was, to his mind, his own affair. Fortunately in the early years of the reign, the King and Parliament were of one mind on the subject. The enemy were the Dutch, England’s chief commercial rivals. In opposing them there was continuity with Cromwell. The First Dutch War (1652–4) had been fought by the republic; the second one broke out in 1665. At first it went well. The fleet, commanded by York, won a convincing victory off Lowestoft, and Dutch colonies in America were seized. But that summer plague broke out virulently in London. It was followed in September 1666 by the Great Fire, which destroyed old St Paul’s and raged from London Bridge to Fleet Street decimating the medieval and Tudor city. There was also a financial crisis. Parliament, though it had clamoured for war, refused further supplies. The Dutch sailed up the Medway and towed away the Royal Charles. Recovery the next year, when Monk and Rupert fought a battle in the Downs and drove the Dutch fleet back to its own ports, scarcely assuaged the bitterness of the previous year’s humiliation. The terms of the peace treaty signed at Dover in 1667 met with disapproval, though England kept her transatlantic conquests and New Amsterdam became New York. The Commons was in an uproar, and Clarendon, blamed for the treaty, was sacrificed to appease them. He retired grumbling to France, to resume work on his History of the Great Rebellion, a work more valuable to posterity than anything he might yet have accomplished as a minister.

  The new administration was known as the Cabal, a sobriquet formed from the first letter of the names of its five leading members: Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, Lauderdale. The term, suggestive of close, even secretive, collaboration, is misleading. Each minister had his own duties. They did not work together, and the principle of collective ministerial responsibility would not emerge for another hundred years. The group had only one thing in common: none was a member of the Church of England. Clifford had been born, and remained, a Catholic; Arlington, as Henry Bennet a companion of the King during the years of exile, was a Catholic convert; Buckingham, since his marriage, posed as an Independent, the champion of the sects – Charles now nicknamed him ‘Alderman George’15; Ashley, later the Earl of Shaftesbury, was a Presbyterian who had served in Cromwell’s administration; Lauderdale was a Scotch Presbyterian. This was not a ministry to commend itself to the orthodox Anglicans of the Cavalier Parliament.

  Charles since his unhappy experiences there disliked, even detested, Scotland. Certainly he had no intention of ever returning, and was content to leave its management to Lauderdale. Uncouth in manner, red-haired, greedy, hard-drinking and with the unpleasant habit of ‘bedewing all he talked to’, because ‘his tongue was too big for his mouth’, Lauderdale was also intelligent and widely read, ‘not only in Latin, but also in Greek and Hebrew’. He was deeply versed in theology, but in the Chapel Royal a preacher once cried out to him, ‘My lord, my lord, you snore so loud you will wake the King.’ Charles trusted him, saying he would ‘venture Lauderdale with any man in Europe for prudence and courage’.16 He had been a Covenanter, an Engager, and then a royalist. Imprisoned in the Tower after Worcester, he had read Hobbes’s Leviathan, and, surveying the confusion of Scotland, had concluded that the government of the saints could be as regardless of law and custom as any absolute king. Monarchy, supported by a loyal aristocracy, offered the best chance of stability. He was happy to impose bishops on the Kirk to secure discipline. His policy met with some success, but the extreme Covenanters could not be appeased. Rejecting the royal government, they were subject to intermittent persecution, and responded by rebellion and acts of terrorism, chief among them the murder of James Sharp, Archbishop of St Andrews, by a gang of zealots acting in the name of God and the Covenant.

  France had been allied to the Dutch, if not very effectively, in the recent war, and the King was now eager to bring about a reorientation in foreign policy. He envied his cousin Louis’s absolute mastery in his state, though mocking the extreme formality of the French court – ‘He cannot piss,’ he said, ‘but someone must hold the pot for him.’ Negotiations for a French alliance were opened, and went so well that in 1670 Louis sent Minette to Dover to sign a treaty on his behalf. Charles was delighted to see his little sister again and all went swimmingly. The public treaty sealed an alliance between the countries and cousins; secret clauses provided Charles with a French pension in exchange for a promise to declare himself a Catholic and re-establish Catholicism in England. This promise was to be fulfilled when Charles judged the time to be ripe. It never would be; Charles knew the temper of his people too well to believe it possible. But promises cost nothing and he needed the money. Perhaps it also pleased him to please Minette.

  It was his last opportunity to do so. She died very soon after her return to France, only eight hours after being taken ill. There were, as usual, rumours of poison, administered, it was said, by the order of her jealous husband. The little Duc de Saint-Simon in his Memoirs of Louis XIV and the Regency declared that the guilty men were two friends of Monsieur’s lover, the Chevalier, who had been exiled and was then in Rome. Asked whether Monsieur himself had been involved, they said, ‘No; it was well-known that he was incapable of keeping any secret.’17 Voltaire, in his history of Louis’s reign, thought the story ridiculous. ‘Human malice and the love of the extraordinary were the sole reasons for this general persuasion.’ Minette ‘had long suffered from an abscess in the liver. She was in a very bad state of health, and had also been delivered of a still-born child…Mankind would indeed be unhappy were it as common to commit atrocious crimes as to believe them,’18 he added, speaking with the voice of eighteenth-century sceptical Reason. Be that as it may, her death cast a gloom on both the French and English courts. The incomparable letter-writer Madame de Sevigné said that ‘All happiness, attractiveness and pleasure have gone out of the Court with her.’19 They had even more surely gone from Charles’s life. The family was contracting sharply. Their mother, Henrietta Maria, had died the previous year in the French convent to which she had retired, and now only the King and York were left.

  The King, however, had a new mistress. Louise de Kérouaille had come to Dover as a member of Minette’s household. Charles was immediately taken by her baby-faced beauty, and when she returned to England a few months after Minette’s death, originally at the suggestion of Buckingham, who thought he could use her to control the King, Charles quickly took her to his bed. He called her ‘Fubbs’ and made her Duchess of Portsmouth; while a son, born a couple of years later, was given the titles of Duke of Richmond and Earl of March in England, and Duke of Lennox and Earl of Darnley in Scotland, the previous holder of them, Frances Stewart’s husband, having conveniently died without a male heir.20 ‘Fubbs’ was unpopular, regarded as a French spy, which she may well have been, for Louis XIV made her Duchess d’Aubigny (a title held by the Lennox Stewarts), ostensibly as a mark of his friendship for his cousin of England. Nell Gwyn laughed at the new Duchess’s pretensions, and once, when her coach was stoned by a crowd who mistook it for Louise’s, thrust her head out of the window and told them they were making a mistake bec
ause she was ‘the Protestant whore’.

  The treaty provoked suspicion. ‘The public articles are bad enough,’ said one Member of Parliament. ‘What then may the secret articles be like?’21 Only the two Catholic ministers of the Cabal had known of them. Disgruntled, Shaftesbury and Buckingham resigned office, and drifted into opposition, steadfast in Shaftesbury’s case, characteristically whimsical and flippant in Buckingham’s.

  The first crisis year of the reign was 1672. France attacked the Netherlands, threatening to overrun the country, which alarmed English Protestants, who from now on saw France, rather than Spain, which was in decline, as the menacing Catholic power, and accordingly questioned the alliance made at Dover. Then there was revolution in Holland, directed against the pro-French republican oligarchy, whose policy of appeasement had failed to prevent war. Its leader, Jan de Witt, and his brother Cornelius were murdered by a mob, and Charles’s nephew, William, Prince of Orange, was made Stadtholder at the age of twenty-two and given command of the army. Though he was no great general, William’s courage, tenacity and committed defiance of Louis XIV would make him the centrepiece of coalitions resisting French aggression for the next thirty years, and the hero of Protestant Europe.

  With unusually poor timing, Charles chose this moment to issue a Declaration of Indulgence, suspending repressive religious laws, and offering freedom of worship to Protestant Dissenters and Roman Catholics alike. The Commons, dominated by Anglican squires, was furious. Even the Dissenters were suspicious. Like the Trojan, they feared the Greeks even when bearing gifts. Enough was now known, or at least suspected, of the secret clauses in the Dover treaty to make the Declaration seem like the first steps in a plot against Protestant England. Charles, knowing, as his father had not, when to yield, withdrew the Declaration. Parliament responded by passing a Test Act in 1673, which required anyone holding public office or a commission in the army or navy to take communion according to the rites of the Church of England and to affirm their belief in its Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion. Charles gave his assent to the act as the only means of getting Parliament to grant sufficient money to enable him to continue to put the Fleet to sea against the Dutch. Despite a victory gained at Southwold Bay in May 1672, the war was inconclusive. It was also increasingly unpopular, for there were many in Parliament who had come to believe that it was the French rather than the Dutch who now offered the most serious threat to England’s interest. Meanwhile Clifford, fearing impeachment for his part in the Dover treaty, cut his own throat. York, as a Catholic convert, was compelled to resign the office of Lord High Admiral. Charles bent with the wind and appointed the Anglican Lord Danby as his chief minister.

  Three years later, in 1676, Danby, preferring a Dutch to a French alliance, arranged a marriage between York’s elder daughter, Mary, and William of Orange. Charles consented happily enough. In the years of exile, he had been very fond of William as a small boy, finding him pretty, intelligent, spirited and original. He called him ‘Piccinino’ and would have been happy to spoil him, until the boy’s mother, Charles’s sister Mary, made a jealous scene about his interest in her son. Something of his affection for him may have remained, though he may also have found it difficult to recognise the pretty child who had amused him in the chilly and reserved manner of the young man.

  The political nation was restive, many displeased by the King’s reluctance to enter into an effective alliance to check French expansionism, though it was difficult to see how this threatened British interests, and it was in any case brought to a temporary halt when a treaty was signed at Nimuegen in 1678. Others were alarmed by the prospect of the succession of the Catholic Duke of York to his brother’s throne. The opposition politicians led by Shaftesbury began to talk of seeking a means either of changing the succession or of imposing new limits on the power of the Crown. They were now known as Whigs, the name taken from the Scotch Covenanting rebels, while the loyalists began to be called Tories – Irish Catholic brigands. It was into this inflamed and excitable atmosphere that there now entered the extraordinary figure of Titus Oates.

  Oates was a scoundrel, a pathological fantasist and liar, whose career had hitherto been erratic. Ordained as a clergyman of the Church of England, he had been imprisoned for falsely accusing a schoolmaster of indecent relations with his pupils. He had then secured a chaplaincy in the navy and been dismissed from that post on suspicion of sodomy. He converted, or pretended to convert, to Catholicism, studied at a Jesuit college at Valladolid in Spain, from which he was also duly expelled, and then from another at St Omer in France. Now in 1678, claiming to be a doctor of divinity from the University of Salamanca, he reappeared in London and declared that he had evidence of a vile popish plot to assassinate the King and massacre Protestants. He laid information before a magistrate, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, who, a few days later, was found stabbed to death on Primrose Hill. The crime was never solved. (It would be nice to think Oates himself had killed Godfrey to add credibility to his outrageous lies.) London was in a fever of excitement. Oates appeared before the Privy Council. The King cross-questioned him and caught him out in lies and contradictions, but it was to no avail. The Salamanca doctor was the hero of the hour, hailed as a Protestant hero. Catholics were arrested, tried and convicted by excited juries on Oates’s evidence. Among them was York’s Jesuit chaplain, Father Coleman, whose papers did indeed suggest that he looked forward to the day when his Catholic master should sit on his brother’s throne. But that was all. Charles, temporising till the fire died down, signed death warrants for innocent men, reluctantly but reprehensibly. ‘Let the blood lie on those who condemned them, for God knows I sign with tears in my eyes.’22

  It was a witch-hunt, the fires stoked by the Whigs. For the moment everything seemed to be going their way. In Scotland the extreme Covenanters were now in open rebellion, though this was checked by the royal army commanded by the Duke of Monmouth, already with military experience in the Dutch army led by his cousin, William of Orange; he further enhanced his reputation by displaying moderation in victory and unusual humanity to the defeated. Meanwhile in London there were echoes of 1640–41 as the opposition seemed to be carrying all before them. But Charles, unlike his father, knew how to give the impression of yielding without in fact doing so, and played for time. Danby had been impeached on charges of corruption by the Whigs and sent to the Tower. Charles dissolved Parliament to halt the impeachment, and called a new one in which, however, the Whigs were still in the ascendant. He made known to those around him his distrust of Shaftesbury, whom he called ‘Little Sincerity’. Attending a performance of Macbeth, the King loudly remarked when the murderers came on the stage, ‘Pray, what is the reason that we never see a rogue in a play, but – odds fish – they always clap on him a black periwig, when it is well known the greatest rogue in England wears a fair one?’23 And he warned Shaftesbury himself: ‘My lord, let there be no self-delusion. I am none of those that grow more timorous with age – rather, I grow more resolute; the nearer I am to the grave, I intend to take a greater care of my own preservation – and that of my people.’24 He resisted even Tory suggestions that he might defuse the crisis by divorcing his wife and marrying again in the hope that a new wife would provide him with a legitimate son: ‘She is a weak woman,’ he said of Catherine, ‘and has some disagreeable humours, but, considering my faultiness towards her, I think it a horrid thing to abandon her.’25 He knew the popish plot was nonsense: ‘Brother,’ he told York, ‘I am sure no man in England will take away my life to make you king.’26 He was loyal to his brother and determined to secure his succession. So he continued to temporise.

  Then Shaftesbury blundered. If York was to be excluded, then the crown should pass to his elder daughter Mary, wife of the Protestant hero William of Orange. But Shaftesbury had inherited the Cromwellian hostility to the Dutch, and was also himself in receipt of a pension from Louis XIV (for the French king in Machiavellian style played both sides, to keep England in turmoil and preclude th
e danger of effective intervention on the Continent). So ‘Little Sincerity’ promoted Monmouth, the Protestant duke, as his candidate for the throne, and his supporters spoke enthusiastically of ‘the Black Box’ in which were lodged papers that would prove Charles had married Lucy Walter long ago and that Monmouth was therefore his legitimate son and heir.

  Charles had always denied the marriage; he continued to do so. Monmouth might be his favourite child. He had always delighted in his beauty, charm and high spirits, but he had no great opinion of his judgement, intelligence or good sense. He was displeased to see the young man being used by his enemies, and making a tour of the West Country, where he was received with joy and acclamation. Moreover, Charles knew that the Whigs’ aim was not only to change the succession, but to weaken the Crown. He had already sent James away, first to Holland and then to act as his viceroy in Scotland. Now he ordered Monmouth to go abroad too, while assuring him privately that he would always love him.

  He offered the Whigs a compromise. He would agree to limitations being placed on his successor’s power. In making this offer he followed the advice of a new minister, the Earl of Halifax. It is probable that Charles was not sincere, equally likely that he made the offer in the certainty that it would not satisfy the Whigs, now determined on passing an act to exclude James from the throne. If so, he had calculated well. The offer was refused, and moderate opinion shifted against Shaftesbury. Royal propaganda became more effective. John Dryden, Poet Laureate since 1668, published Absalom and Achitophel, a masterpiece of political satire, in which he pointed up the parallel between the Whigs’ plotting and the Old Testament account of the rebellion against King David, nominally led by his favourite son, Absalom. Shaftesbury and Buckingham were vigorously lampooned. Shaftesbury, as ‘the false Achitophel, A name to all succeeding ages cursed’: ‘Great wits are sure to madness near allied, / And thin partitions do their walls divide.’ As for Buckingham, he appeared as Zimri: ‘Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, / Was everything by starts, and nothing long.’ A near insane fanatic and one who ‘in the course of each revolving moon, / Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon’: these were the chiefs of the Whig party, as presented by the King’s poet.27