Most importantly, the Declaration stated that there would be no bloody reprisals or the restoration of the Stuart monarchy as it had existed under Charles I. Instead, the restoration would not be the victory of the royalist cause, but a continuation of strong government as it had existed under Cromwell. Finally, the Declaration of Breda promised to bind up the wounds of a bleeding nation. It offered pardon to all, save effectively those directly participating in the late king’s execution. But most strikingly and unthinkably for the heir of Charles I, it also offered liberty of worship. ‘We do Declare a Liberty to tender consciences; and that no Man shall be disquieted or called in question for Differences of Opinion in matter of Religion, which do not disturb the Peace of the Kingdom.’ Was the genie of the Royal Supremacy, with its fatal harnessing of politics and religion, to be exorcized at last?
In April 1660, a new parliament, known as the Convention, was elected. Edward Montagu, earl of Manchester, who a decade and a half earlier had opposed the king’s trial and execution, was appointed Speaker of the House of Lords. Overwhelmingly pro-royalist, the Convention first undertook to debate the question of the restoration of the monarchy. The parliament that only eleven years earlier had helped kill the king now debated the return of his son, Charles II.
On 30 April, the Convention MPs processed to hear a sermon in St Margaret’s, Westminster. Preached by the Presbyterian Richard Baxter, who, a few years previously, had been so shocked by the religious anarchy of the New Model Army, it was entitled ‘A Sermon of Repentance’. It argued that both the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians had sinned by fighting each other to establish their exclusive vision of the Church. Instead they should unite in as comprehensive a national Church settlement as possible. His call was heeded, and the next day both sides joined together to vote for the recall of the king.
On 1 May 1660, Parliament declared that the government should be by king, Lords and Commons. A week later, Charles was proclaimed by both Houses. The king and his court made haste to return to England. He was greeted with joy in London, where he processed through the streets. The diarist John Evelyn recorded: ‘I stood in the Strand, and beheld it, and blessed God: And all this without one drop of blood, and by that very army, which rebelled against him.’
On 23 April 1661, Charles II, who had already been crowned king of Scotland a decade earlier, processed to Westminster Abbey for his second coronation, this time as king of England, almost a year after his return. It was St George’s Day, and everything was done to restore the traditional forms. The king had even revived the eve-of-coronation procession from the Tower to Westminster that had been dispensed with by his father and grandfather. The procession took over five hours to pass and was of unparalleled magnificence, as was the coronation. All the ancient robes and regalia, which had been deliberately destroyed after the abolition of the kingship, were lovingly re-created as far as possible to the old dimensions and forms.
The service followed the text used for his father and grandfather, and at the ensuing coronation banquet held in Westminster Hall the King’s Champion flung down his gauntlet in the traditional challenge to fight in single combat any who would deny the claim of Charles II to be the rightful heir to the Imperial Crown of England.
It was almost as though the Civil War, the Republic and the Protectorate had never been. But political clocks cannot be turned back so easily, as Charles II, his Church and people quickly discovered.
PART IV
EMPIRE
Chapter 19
Restoration
Charles II, James II
AT ROCHESTER ON 23 DECEMBER 1688, King James II of England, who had reigned less than four years, fled into exile. It was the second time in forty years that the English had dethroned a king.
There was to be none of the high tragedy of the trial and execution of Charles I, James’s father, the last time the English rid themselves of a king. Instead, James’s downfall was a pitiable farce. He had already tried and somehow failed to flee from his subjects a fortnight earlier on the 11th, when, after throwing the Great Seal into the Thames, he rode disguised as an ordinary country gentleman to the north Kent coast. There he embarked for France. But his boat was intercepted by suspicious and disrespectful fishermen and forced back to Faversham. And even his second attempt at flight succeeded only with the connivance of his sonin-law and usurper, William III, who sensibly wanted him out of the way.
But, despite these elements of black humour, James’s dethronement brought about lasting change in a way which his father’s hadn’t. This, the fourth part of the book, tells the story of how this came about. It follows the resulting spread of the values of property, prosperity and freedom from these islands across the globe. And it shows that despite some conspicuous exceptions individual kings and queens tended to help rather than hinder the process.
But it begins at the monarchy’s lowest point, by explaining how the House of Stuart lost the throne again only thirty years after James’s elder brother, Charles II, had regained it in the Restoration of 1660. The old issues of religion and succession had arisen once more. But so too did a new question: which model of modernity should the British monarchy follow – the French or the Dutch? At stake were fundamental choices: between persecution and religious toleration, between absolutism and government by consent, and between success and failure.
I
Outside the Banqueting House in Westminster every Friday from June 1660 a huge crowd waited impatiently to be admitted into the presence of their newly restored sovereign, King Charles II. Many of them may well have remembered a very different scene at this same spot eleven years previously, when King Charles I had been publicly beheaded following his trial for treason.
But now England’s experiment with republicanism was at an end, and once more a son of the House of Stuart sat beneath the canopy of state to receive his people. But they were here not merely to pay their respects. They had come instead to be cured by the magical caress of their sovereign, for it was firmly believed that the king’s hands could banish scrofula, a disfiguring tuberculosis of the lymph nodes. Every Friday Charles would touch for the King’s Evil, and over the course of his reign he would lay his hands on more than ninety thousand of his grateful subjects.
The ceremony of touching for the King’s Evil was a sign of the divine nature of English kingship. But ever since the reign of Henry VIII, the connection between divinity and kingship had been more than mystical – it was political.
The assumption of religious authority was an enormous boost to royal power and prestige, but for Henry’s successors the Supremacy had proved to be something of a poisoned chalice as, inevitably, the monarchy had become the focus of the violent religious conflicts provoked by the Protestant Reformation. Charles II had grown up as these disputes reached their culmination in political meltdown, civil war and regicide. Now he had been swept back with popular rejoicing to take the crown that had been abolished with his father’s execution. He would soon find, however, that the quarrels that had led England into civil war were far from settled.
At first sight, King Charles was well suited to pick his way through the political quagmire that followed Cromwell’s death. Charles I had lost the throne by his unbending adherence to principle: to the authority of the king in the state and of the bishops in the Church. In contrast, the only rigid thing about Charles II was his male member. He fathered at least fourteen children by nine different mothers and more or less single-handedly repopulated the depleted ranks of the English nobility. When he was egregiously hailed as ‘Father of his people’, Charles laughed, replying that he had certainly fathered a great number of them.
Otherwise there was nothing to which he would not stoop his six-foot frame; no corner, however tight, which he could not turn; and no loyalty, however deep, which, once it ceased to be convenient, he recognized as binding.
Like many such men, he had an easy charm. He was affable, good humoured and witty, though his intelligence was practical
rather than scholarly. But he was as lazy as he was treacherous, and really applied himself only when his back was to the wall. In short, Charles could ride almost any tide. But steering a consistent course was beyond him.
The first test of both Charles’s resolution and his honesty came over religion. As one MP said, the principles of the restored monarchy were that Charles should ‘not be king of this or that party, but to be king of all’. Charles realized that it was good politics to live up to this. In the Declaration of Breda, the manifesto that had helped win him the throne, Charles had made an unequivocal promise of ‘liberty to tender consciences’, or religious toleration, for all the disparate groups that had rebelled against the Stuart monarchy. All the other undertakings of Breda about disputed title to land, war crimes and arrears of army pay were swiftly passed into legislation by the Convention Parliament, often using the precise, carefully chosen words of the Declaration itself.
But not religious toleration. Before the Civil War, Parliament had split over the intertwined issues of royal power and religion. The king’s Anglican supporters took as their biblical text Paul’s letter to the Romans, in which he states that ‘the powers that be are ordained of God’. Anglicans interpreted this to mean that their highest religious duty was to obey the monarch, no matter what he did.
Opposing them were the Presbyterians, and other more extreme Protestant dissenting sects, who countered with Peter’s saying in the Acts of the Apostles: ‘It is better to obey God than man.’ These opponents of absolute royal power had won the Civil War, but with the Restoration they had lost the peace.
In the elections to Charles’s first parliament those who had fought alongside his father to defend the established Church of England and the king’s role as its supreme governor were returned in large numbers, hence its nickname, the ‘Cavalier Parliament’. In the political ascendant at last, the Cavaliers insisted on the enforcement of rigid Anglican conformity by oaths to be administered on all clergymen, dons, teachers and members of town and city corporations.
The result was known as the Clarendon Code, after Charles’s chief minister and Lord Chancellor, Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. There is dispute as to whether Hyde had planned to subvert Charles’s offer of toleration all along or whether he simply took advantage of circumstances. But there is no doubt that the Code reflected Clarendon’s view that the Church of England was the only true Church and that only the Church of England taught the proper obedience of subjects to the king.
Charles had little sympathy with the Church’s Protestant opponents, whom he blamed for the Civil War and his father’s execution. But with Roman Catholics it was a very different story. The queen mother, Henrietta Maria, was a proselytizing Catholic, and there were persistent rumours that Charles himself had converted to Catholicism, or at least was dangerously partial to it. In fact he had few firm beliefs, and deplored the intolerant zeal of every group. As he said, he ‘should be glad that those distinctions between his subjects might be removed; and that whilst they were all equally good subjects, they might equally enjoy his protection’. Charles sought to address these problems and to salve his conscience over the broken promise of toleration in the Declaration of Breda by issuing a second declaration in December 1662. It referred to the king’s discretionary power to ‘dispense’ with the Clarendon Code for both Protestants and Catholics who ‘modestly and without scandal performed their devotions in their own way’, and called on Parliament to pass an Act to make such a suspension of the Code general and permanent.
But the ultra-royalist Cavalier House of Commons, with its hardline Anglican majority and absolute loyalty to the monarchy, refused their monarch point blank. They had not fought the Civil War and suffered under Cromwell to see the monarchy adopt their enemies’ principles. And Charles, aware above all that Anglicans were the strongest supporters of the restored monarchy, had to acquiesce.
II
After these domestic frustrations, foreign policy seemed to offer an opportunity for decisive action and the glory of war.
The seventeenth century had been the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic. After surviving the Spanish attempt at reconquest in the late sixteenth century with English help that was neither consistently given nor very effective when it was, the Dutch had gone on to become an economic superpower that threatened to take over English trade. The English had already tried to cut them down to size in the first Anglo-Dutch War in the 1650s. Now Charles was persuaded that he should seek to outdo Cromwell by launching a second conflict.
The war began well with the great victory of Lowestoft in 1665, when the fleet, commanded in person by Charles’s brother James, duke of York, as Lord Admiral, defeated the enemy and blew up the Dutch flagship, together with the Dutch commander, Admiral Opdam. But then the attempted seizure of the Dutch East Indies fleet in a neutral port misfired; the domestic disasters of the Great Plague in 1665 and the Great Fire of London the following year hampered the war effort and things hit rock bottom when the Dutch admiral De Ruyter sailed up the Medway, where the English fleet was anchored, captured the flagship the Royal Charles, on which the king had returned to England in 1660, burnt others and forced the rest to scatter and beach themselves. As was said in London, ‘The bishops get all, the courtiers spend all, the citizens pay for all, the King neglects all, and the Dutch take all.’
It was a national disaster, which led to a profound bout of introspection. ‘In all things,’ reflected the diarist Samuel Pepys, who was in the thick of events as a naval administrator, ‘in wisdom, courage, force, knowledge of our own streams, and success, the Dutch have the best of us, and do end the war with victory on their side.’ Why was England apparently so feeble in defending even its own shores? A spate of books on the Dutch rushed to offer the explanation. The most interesting is Sir Josiah Child’s Brief Observations Concerning Trade and the Interest of Money. Written even before the war was over, it argued that the Dutch Republic was so strong because it had developed secure financial institutions that gave it long-term security and the ability to wage war and expand its commerce, in spite of its geographical disadvantages. Most European monarchs had made a habit, when financially squeezed by the demands of war, of repudiating their creditors, which meant they could borrow only at a high rate of interest. But through the Bank of Amsterdam, with its enviable reputation for honouring its debts, the Dutch could borrow cheaply: a financial advantage that translated into military strength. And Child is to be taken seriously, since he was an expert on finance, having built up one of the greatest City fortunes of his day. Other authors pointed to Dutch religious toleration, which gave the republic domestic peace, as opposed to the civil wars produced by persecution in England. And others again to the superiority of Dutch hygiene, education, poor relief and technical expertise.
Why not, in short, imitate the Dutch instead of fighting them? Why not even ally with them? Especially since a new potent threat to England’s security was arising in Louis XIV’s aggressive, Catholicizing France.
III
France offered an alternative model for a modernizing monarchy. If the Dutch owed their success to innovative republican institutions and consensual government that had made a small and disunited country a world power, then France had become strong by following the opposite path.
France, like England, had been torn apart by civil war in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. But the wars, known as the Fronde, were very different. Instead of pitting the king against his subjects, they were a quarrel within the highest ranks of the nobility and the royal family itself. They came to an end at roughly the same time, however, when in 1661 the twenty-three-year-old Louis XIV, who had been king since the age of five, began his personal rule.
Louis was Charles’s first cousin and the two were similar in appearance, with their powerful physique, swarthy complexion, full lips and hooked nose. They also shared the same insatiable sexual appetite. But there the resemblance ended.
For Louis, despite his lust
fulness, was a man of rigid dignity, inflexible will and unbending self-discipline. His iron self-control meant, for instance, that he was able to give a public audience immediately after an operation, without anaesthetic of course, to treat an anal fistula. And what he expected of himself, he demanded of others.
Louis’s motto, seen to this day on the ceiling of the Hall of Mirrors at the heart of his great palace of Versailles, was Le Roy gouverne par luimême: ‘the King rules by himself ’. This meant that there would be no great minister or corrupt court faction or even parliament to come between the king and his people. Instead, he, Louis, would personally direct a close-knit group of departmental officials. They came from modest backgrounds and shared Louis’s appetite for hard work and belief in discipline. Above all, they were at one with his commitment to the glory of France and her king.
Colbert, the minister of finance, directed an ambitious programme of state-sponsored industrial growth and overseas imperial expansion; Vauban, a military architect of genius, protected France’s borders with vast fortifications; Louvois, the minister of war, reorganized the army and oversaw a series of aggressive campaigns that expanded French territory towards her ‘natural frontier’ on the Rhine and beyond; even the arts – painting, music, architecture, the theatre – and science were subjected to central direction and made to hymn the glories of le Roy soleil, ‘the Sun King’.
Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy Page 43