To Catch a King

by Charles Spencer

  Soon after arriving there, Leslie was allowed to have the liberty of the Tower and to have his servant with him. In contrast to other prisoners who were suffering appalling treatment within the same walls, he was permitted to receive friends bringing clothes and other supplies, ‘provided they only speak to him in the presence of the Lieutenant [of the Tower], or such as he shall appoint’. The Scottish general’s lenient treatment had long been anticipated, an eyewitness who had seen him in Newcastle nine days after the defeat at Worcester writing: ‘I believe old Leslie may find the more civil usage, in regard he was formerly a General for the Parliamentarians in England.’7

  Many of those closest to Charles remained convinced that Leslie had acted treacherously. Thomas Wall wrote to his brother John at the end of 1651: ‘All intelligent people conclude that [the king] was betrayed by David Leslie.’8 But the king saw fit to free him, and even reward him, giving him the title of 1st Baron Newark for his services to the Royalist cause. This was seen as a slap in the face to many Cavaliers who had suffered more harshly for true loyalty.

  Leslie’s fellow Scottish lieutenant general, John Middleton, also prospered. He had been taken prisoner by Parliamentary troops at the battle of Preston in 1648, and had been released on condition that he never fight against them again. When he had been wounded at, and quickly captured after, Worcester, it seemed all but certain that he would be charged with treason for breaking his word, and sentenced to death. Awaiting trial, he managed to escape from the Tower of London by changing clothes with his wife during one of her visits. He joined Charles in exile in Paris, and returned to Scotland in 1654 to lead an unsuccessful rising, before returning to the king’s side. His reward at the Restoration was being created Earl of Middleton, and receiving various high offices. Having been humiliated by the Scottish Presbyterians a decade earlier, when they forced him to wear sackcloth and ashes in public penance, he now focused on cutting back their power, and restoring the bishops.

  There were losers as well as winners.

  One of Charles’s reasons for allying with the Scots had been to have their assistance in bringing his father’s murderers to justice. More than twenty of the eighty regicides had died in the eleven years between Charles I’s execution and the Restoration, but the rest were now held to account for their crime.

  The first to be sentenced was Major General Thomas Harrison, who was connected so closely in people’s consciousness with Charles I’s final journey to trial and execution. He was also remembered clearly by Charles II, as the man put in charge of his capture after the battle of Worcester. Harrison refused to flee at the return of the Stuart regime. He was arrested at home, and brought to London. He readily admitted to his actions in court, and was condemned to die by hanging, drawing and quartering. Harrison was magnificently brave on the day of his execution, firm in his belief that whatever suffering he had to undergo, it was for his God. After being hanged half to death, then mutilated terribly by the executioner with knives and other tools, he still managed to swing a punch that sent his slaughterer flying. Samuel Pepys witnessed the major general’s death, recording how ‘his head and heart [were] shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy’.

  In vengeance for the death of the Marquess of Montrose, his great enemies were executed. The Marquess of Argyll went to London on the Restoration to pay his respects to the new king, but Charles refused to see him, and had him arrested. Argyll was taken north, and sentenced to death. The watching crowd expected to see a cowardly display on the scaffold, but he died with dignity. Montrose’s rotted head was removed from the spike on Tolbooth prison, and replaced by Argyll’s.

  Sir Archibald Johnston, Lord Wariston, fled abroad at the Restoration, but was captured in Rouen in early 1663. His wife petitioned Charles for mercy, stating that she ‘and her 12 children were reduced to a poor and desolate condition’,9 but it was no good. He was sent on a procession through Edinburgh, similar to that endured by Montrose, watched over by Charles’s life guards ‘with their carbines and naked swords’ at the ready, kettle drums and trumpets sounding, and a regiment of Edinburgh’s soldiers displaying their colours. He ended his life on ‘gallows of extraordinary height’ at Mercat Cross.

  Montrose’s limbs were retrieved from Aberdeen, Glasgow, Perth and Stirling, and his trunk and bowels were brought from Burgh Moor. The parts were placed together in a coffin, and interred with fitting ceremony in the High Kirk of St Giles in Edinburgh.

  The Covenanters received payment for the humiliation they had heaped on Charles a decade earlier, when he had chosen to sacrifice his and his father’s principles in his ill-fated bid for the English throne. Now he renounced the Covenants that he said had been forced out of him by the Scots. In 1662 they were rendered unlawful oaths, which nobody in public office could subscribe to. In a final vindication of his father’s stand, bishops were brought back to oversee the Scottish Church.

  A long way further down the religious pecking order, the Reverend Benjamin Westley, the Puritan parson of Charmouth who had raised the alarm over the king’s presence nearby, was deprived of his parish. He continued his ministry as an itinerant preacher. The following century his great-grandsons, John and Charles Wesley, would found Methodism.

  Sir Edward Hyde had a key hand in brokering the generous terms on which the king returned, and became his most important and trusted adviser. Charles was happy to dump the hard work and subtle requirements of government on Hyde’s shoulders, while he buried himself in pleasure.

  The ecstasy that had greeted Charles’s return soon turned to disappointment, as his extravagance became out of control. Further goodwill was eroded early in his reign when in 1662 he sold the French port of Dunkirk to Louis XIV for five million livres. There were also disasters that Charles was not responsible for: in 1665–66, the bubonic plague claimed the lives of 200,000 of his subjects, while in 1666 the Great Fire of London consumed more than 13,000 houses in the city. There was national humiliation in 1667, when the Dutch fleet sailed up the River Medway and destroyed thirteen ships while capturing the Royal Charles. It was this last that proved disastrous for Hyde.

  Just as Charles had turned away from Hyde when he had advised playing a waiting game, and not allying with enemies of England and its established Church, so he chose to listen to Hyde’s enemies in court and Parliament. They were jealous of his influence, which had increased in 1660 when the Duke of York married Hyde’s daughter Anne, whom he had made pregnant. Hyde was given the title of Earl of Clarendon, and £20,000 to support that position, the following year. In 1663 he became one of the eight Lords Proprietor of a huge tract of land in America that became the colony of Carolina.†

  Clarendon disapproved of much of Charles’s behaviour, and never shirked from telling him so. A particular bone of contention was the king’s pleasure-seeking, which Clarendon resented because it kept him from the business of kingship. Clarendon would make the fatal mistake of meddling in matters involving the king’s mistresses.

  In 1663 Charles became infatuated with Frances Stuart, a fifteen-year-old member of his wife’s court. She was the daughter of another court beauty, famous for her dancing skills, and of a doctor. Samuel Pepys reckoned Frances the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. The Comte de Gramont qualified this assessment: ‘It would be difficult to imagine less brain combined with more beauty.’ Her favourite pastimes certainly tended to the childish: ‘blindman’s buff, hunt the slipper, and card-building’.10 Her nickname at court was ‘La Belle Stuart’.

  Charles’s lust reached new heights when Frances seemed unobtainable, refusing to become his mistress. When his queen was seriously ill, he contemplated taking Frances as his wife as soon as he became a widower. At other times he was so distracted by sexual longing that he thought of divorce, to free himself for Frances’s hand in marriage.

  The king was therefore furious when, in the spring of 1667, he learnt that his cousin the Duke of Richmond, whose second wife had recently died, had secretly
married Frances. The Earl of Lauderdale, who had endured nine years of imprisonment by Parliament after the battle of Worcester, and who was now Charles II’s favourite, wrote that he had never seen the king ‘more offended than he is at the duke, and all concerned’.11 Clarendon was viewed as having had a hand in the furtive marriage. His enemies said he wanted to keep Charles married to a queen who could not have children, rather than jeopardise the inheritance of his own granddaughters, who stood second and third in line to the throne.

  Clarendon also managed to cross swords with Barbara Castlemaine, the king’s favourite mistress throughout the 1660s. Charles wanted Barbara on hand in the court, even after the arrival of his wife Catherine of Braganza in 1662. The queen implored Clarendon to spare her from this humiliation, but when Clarendon asked the king to reconsider Castlemaine’s court position, Charles bared his teeth: ‘If you desire to have the continuance of my friendship, meddle no more with this business … whosoever I find to be my Lady Castlemaine’s enemy in this matter, I do promise, upon my word, to be his enemy as long as I live.’12 Castlemaine worked with Clarendon’s rivals to unseat him. There were plenty of enemies to help in this, because of his famed arrogance and short temper, as well as jealousy at his power and influence.

  Charles, bored with Clarendon’s moralising and resentful of his executive power, agreed to his dismissal in disgrace. In 1667 Clarendon was made the scapegoat for the Dutch naval triumph in the Medway. Having originally hoped that he could ride out his master’s displeasure, Clarendon took Charles’s heavy hints and removed himself to France, hoping that this would eventually lead to forgiveness and accommodation. There he finished writing his great history of the Civil Wars before dying suddenly of a stroke, at the age of sixty-five, in 1674. Two of his granddaughters, Mary and Anne, became queens of England.

  * John’s childhood tutor was a member of the Giffard family, which had provided Whiteladies and Boscobel House as hiding places during Charles’s flight.

  † A fellow Lord Proprietor was Sir George Carteret, who had held the island of Jersey for the Crown, and had twice provided a safe haven there for Charles in the five years before Worcester. Carteret was also given joint ownership of a large tract of land between the Delaware River and the Hudson River. This was named ‘New Jersey’.

  19

  Redemption

  If he loved too much to lie upon his own Down-bed of Ease, his subjects had the Pleasure, during his Reign, of lolling and stretching upon theirs.

  George Savile, Marquess of Halifax

  By early 1685, nearly a quarter of a century into his reign, Charles II’s life was one of unashamed self-indulgence. The fifty-four-year-old monarch had huge appetites for luxury, for food, for drink, and for women. Some of his subjects called him ‘Old Rowley’, in reference to one of the more fertile stallions in the royal stables.

  Charles had no legitimate heirs, because Catherine was unable to produce them. But the dozen children he had sired by seven of his mistresses were acknowledged, and indulged with varying degrees of titles and extravagance. Wilmot’s wickedly witty son, the 2nd Earl of Rochester, would sum up the king’s endless promiscuity with:

  Restless he rolls from whore to whore

  A very monarch, scandalous and poor.

  Charles’s health was becoming troublesome after decades of hard living. His close confidants noted his obvious drop in energy. There had been seizures in 1679 that had caused serious concern for his life until, an attendant noted, he ‘exchanged water-gruels and potions for mutton and partridges, on which he feeds frequently and heartily’. A return of his famed gluttony was a good sign.

  Since the middle of 1684 he had been forced by gout, and a painful heel, to forgo the two vigorous daily walks that had kept him lean. He liked to take his dozen spaniels with him, and feed the ducks in St James’s Park. The loss of this favourite exercise left him feeling low.

  But on 1 February 1685 Charles found a way of passing his day that fitted his tastes and his reduced mobility. It was a Sunday, and after being taken by carriage for dinner with courtiers, where he filled his stomach with a variety of delicacies including a pair of goose eggs, he went to the sumptuous Whitehall quarters of Louise de Kérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, the intoxicating mistress sent by Louis XIV both to pleasure the king and to spy on him. By this time Charles’s entertainment needed to be highly spiced to register on his jaded palate, and John Evelyn remembered that evening’s raucous offerings with shock: ‘I can never forget the inexpressible luxury and profaneness, gaming and all manner of dissoluteness, and as it were total forgetfulness of God (it being Sunday evening) which this day se’nnight [a week before] I was witness of, the King sitting and toying with his concubines, Portsmouth, Cleveland, and Mazarin, etc., a French boy singing love songs, in that glorious gallery, whilst about 20 of the great courtiers and other dissolute persons were at Basset round a large table, a bank of at least 2,000 in gold before them.’

  Charles was in fine spirits, typically charming and relaxed. Those present recalled that they had not seen him so happy and well for some time.

  As he was escorted back to his rooms, his groom’s large candle suddenly went out. On reaching his bedroom, Charles went to the lavatory as usual, accompanied by the Earl of Ailesbury, providing light, and by Charles Killigrew, standing ready with paper.

  The two senior courtiers then changed into their night clothes, locked the door, and lay down to sleep near their master’s bed. It was a far from peaceful bedroom, with spaniels roaming, the fire crackling, and Charles’s large collection of clocks ticking and whirring. But Ailesbury remembered an added disturbance that night: the sound of the king frequently tossing and turning. This was unusual for him.

  In the morning, as staff were let in to feed the fire, Charles returned to the lavatory. A servant he passed on the way was shocked to see how pale and ill he looked.

  There was mounting concern among the waiting courtiers, as well as the doctors who had come to inspect Charles’s ankle, when the king eventually reappeared from the lavatory, helped by Mr Chiffins, a courtier whose titles included that of Keeper of the Closet. Charles was unsteady on his feet, his colour was terrible, and he was unable to take part in the customary morning exchanges. He was silent and distracted. When he could speak, he would lose the thread and stop in mid-sentence.

  Charles liked to be shaved by his bedroom window, and this daily ritual started at eight o’clock that Monday morning. The barber was halfway through tucking in the towel around the king’s neck when Charles suddenly lurched backwards, seized by violent convulsions. The Earl of Ailesbury caught him, and two royal physicians rushed forward.

  Sir Edmund King, a well-respected surgeon and a keen chemist, insisted that Charles be bled, otherwise he would certainly die. This was a daring assessment, as the procedure was considered an act of treason unless approved by the king’s senior councillors, but Sir Edmund said he would take full responsibility.* As Charles slumped in the barber’s chair, sixteen ounces of blood were taken from his right arm. A muzzle was put in his mouth to stop him from biting off his tongue as the terrible convulsions continued. This was the start of the king’s torment, as he was subjected to ordeal by medical ignorance, inflicted on him by what one of their number believed to be ‘physicians of the greatest loyalty and skill’.1 Their loyalty cannot be questioned.

  The royal doctors agreed that Charles’s system needed extreme stimulation, to stop him drifting into sleep. They burnt his shoulders with three scorching cupping-glasses, and then removed another eight ounces of his blood through superficial incisions.

  The next objective was a complete purge of the king’s system. An emetic was poured into his mouth, made from ‘half an ounce of Orange Infusion of the metals, made in white wine’, but only half of it went down. They added a shot of zinc sulphate in peony water, to further induce nausea. These attacks on the contents of Charles’s stomach and intestines were further reinforced by laxatives and an enema.
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  His hair was clipped away, so that his scalp could be covered with plasters doused in a blistering agent. The convulsions continued while other parts of Charles’s body were cauterised. He was given another enema, then hellebore root was rubbed into his nostrils to burn the membrane, while his scalp was given fresh caustic plasters.

  The queen now appeared, but, a delicate and gentle lady, she was so upset at the sight of her husband in his terrible suffering that she had to return to her rooms, distraught. James, Duke of York – Charles’s heir – arrived in such haste that he had a shoe on one foot and a slipper on the other. He would remain with his brother throughout nearly every moment of his illness.

  Charles was moved to his bed, and had a slight resurgence. He was able to talk, and explained how he had felt ill while in bed the previous night, so he had gone to his bathroom to take some ‘King’s Drops’, an expensive concoction made of alcohol with powder from ground-up human skulls (often provided by Irish gravediggers). The King’s Drops had failed to improve his condition. But now, after the initial bloodletting and the other remedies, he said he felt a little better. The physicians pronounced him out of danger.

  That evening, feeling the king was in need of further medical help to prevent a recurrence of his terrible fits, the doctors reverted to their rich repertoire of quackery. They put pungent plasters containing pigeon droppings on his feet, and applied poultices elsewhere, made of cowslips mixed with hydrochloric acid and ammonium. Charles was encouraged to drink an emulsion at frequent intervals, to reduce the burning in his urine caused by all the blistering agents he had been forced to endure. This contained a blend of barley, licorice and almonds, sweetened with sugar. He was to alternate this with a thin broth, while at night he was allowed as much ‘light ale made without hops’ as his doctors thought he needed.