King Charles II

by Fraser, Antonia

  The Hague itself was not a bad place in which to take up residence. It was cut off from the inhospitable North Sea by a stretch of dunes and had been designated the seat of the States-General, and of the provincial body, the States of Holland, at the end of the sixteenth century. When Prince Maurice of Nassau settled there in 1618 it became the royal residence as well. The cultural life of The Hague flourished. Not only literature, philosophy and the arts, but that inevitable seventeenth-century offshoot, theology, were part of the general cultural air of the city. While Amsterdam remained the commercial capital, bolstered up by the prosperity brought by commerce and industry, the lifeblood of the Dutch people – painters, philosophers and theologians – enjoyed the free and argumentative atmosphere of The Hague.

  It was a time of development for Charles personally. At least he was free of his mother’s apron strings. With James to care for, he moved to a position as head of the family – those members of it who were at liberty. Then there was his relationship with his sister Mary. It had to be faced that Mary, the pretty, ringleted child of Van Dyck’s pictures, had not grown up into a particularly agreeable young woman. Marriage before she was ready for it and a troublesome mother-in-law – Amalia von Solms was fearfully strong-minded – had combined to inspire in Mary an undiplomatic dislike of her adopted country.

  Poor Mary had inherited the tactlessness of both her parents. She refused to learn Dutch, hardly the mark of an amiable spouse, and made it clear that, in her eyes, France was preferable to Holland. As a result, she has been harshly treated by Dutch historians. Correctly, they have drawn attention to her deficiencies as Dutch consort. It is true that circumstances might explain the emergence of this outwardly chilly figure, indifferent to the susceptibilities of her adopted people. Princesses in those days however were not expected to undergo psychological difficulties. At least the English should regard her with more sympathy, since the consequence of all this was a true devotion to her brother Charles, both to his person and to his interests.

  Nonetheless, it was distressing that the one member of his family in a position to aid Charles practically at this juncture was a square peg in a round hole. As it was, Charles found himself covering up for Mary, atoning for her unfortunate hauteur with his own civility. The Prince of Orange himself was a decent fellow who took his responsibilities to his in-laws seriously, not merely because it would suit him to have his wife’s father back on the throne of England. After William II’s premature death in 1650, Mary’s lack of judgement – like that of her mother, similarly placed – grew worse, and her determination to aid Charles ostentatiously, at the expense of Holland, more pronounced. Once again it was Charles who indulged in graceful little gestures, such as addressing the Elector of Brandenburg as ‘brother’ (indicating an imaginary equality of rank between them, as opposed to the correct salutation of ‘cousin’).1 His sister, on the other hand, did not care to study the art of how to please.

  In general, Mary placed a quite pathetic reliance on her status as an English princess. It gave her a much needed sense of security to meditate on her royal rank: but that again was somewhat tactless in view of the fallen fortunes of the house of Stuart and their reliance on the good will of other European rulers, whether of equal status or not. Determined to emphasize that she remained the daughter of a king, Mary complained loudly that she ought to continue to take precedence over her sister-in-law Louise Henrietta of Orange when she married the Elector of Brandenburg. Mary’s case was weak because the Elector was a supreme ruler, whereas the Prince of Orange was not. The new Electress should really have preceded her.

  In the autumn of 1648 however the devotion of Mary helped to support Charles’ growing feeling of authority in the family. This family was in the process of being extended, on one side of the blanket at least, by the pregnancy of Charles’ mistress Lucy Walter. The character of this straightforward young lady later became surrounded by myths. The truth about Lucy, ‘brown, beautiful and bold’, as John Evelyn called her, was that she was neither a whore, as one legend suggests, nor the chosen bride of the Prince of Wales. She was not even of low birth, as Monmouth’s enemies would declare in later years, in order to taunt him with the fact that other royal bastards – the son of Louise de Kéroüalle for example – were of superior antecedents on their mother’s side. Lucy Walter’s own mother was a niece of the Earl of Carbery; she herself came of a perfectly respectable Welsh family, hence her appealing, dark-eyed Celtic looks.2

  Lucy Walter was not a whore. But she did belong to that restless and inevitably light-moralled generations of young ladies who grew up in the untrammelled times of the Civil War. Barbara Villiers, a far more celebrated mistress of Charles II, was another such. As their brothers, who had grown up frequently without fathers, became the undisciplined high-spirited bucks of the 1660s, so those young ladies who survived to the merrier times of the Restoration became the great ladies of the Court. But Evelyn added that Lucy Walter was ‘insipid’. Perhaps he implied a lack of a survivor’s instinct. For Lucy Walter died in 1658, to be buried in an unnamed grave in Paris. It thus became fashionable to blacken her birth as well as her character.

  Lucy Walter probably ended up at The Hague via Paris, having been taken there by her uncle. She quickly adapted herself to the age in which she found herself. By September at The Hague she was probably the mistress of Robert Sidney (Charles had of course been absent for nearly two months); but she was also pregnant by Charles. Later these simple facts would become embroidered and re-embroidered with all the complicated threads of the succession politics of the 1670s as the circumstances of Monmouth’s birth became a matter of political importance rather than light conjecture. (Even the republican Algernon Sidney was described as her lover – although he was in England throughout the period, guarding Dover Castle.)

  The child afterwards known as James Duke of Monmouth but first called James Crofts, after his guardian Lord Crofts, was born on 9 April 1649. Therefore his conception must have taken place some time in July – that is, just before the Prince of Wales sailed off at the head of his rumbling fleet. It is important to bear the date in mind in view of the fantasies which would later cluster like brambles round the circumstances of this boy’s birth.

  These fantasies take two principal, and contradictory, forms. The first concerns Monmouth’s paternity and suggests that he was not really Charles’ son at all, but, seeing that Lucy was free with her favours, the offspring of Robert Sidney. This canard can be ignored for two reasons. First, Monmouth as a boy bore a striking resemblance to his father at the same age; later he enjoyed the highly characteristic looks of the Stuart family: the paternity over which the scandal-minded sniggered at his birth was never questioned in the periwigged duke, lounging at his royal father’s Court. Secondly, Charles himself never questioned Monmouth’s parentage. He assumed responsibility for the child from his birth and was inclined rather to remove him from his unsuitable mother’s care than to consign him to a limbo of doubtful bastardy. Yet Charles did not acknowledge every child that came his way, as it were – the offspring of every pretty woman that had pleased his fancy. In the 1670s, as a secure monarch, he declined very firmly to acknowledge Barbara Palmer, the sixth child of Barbara Villiers, despite her mother’s protests. It is unlikely that the perilously placed Prince of Wales was any more complaisant in 1648. Obviously Charles had every reason to believe that Monmouth was his son.

  The other fantasy suggested that Monmouth, far from being another man’s bastard, was actually the Prince of Wales’ legitimate son. It is on this point that the date of the baby’s conception becomes vital. It has been seen how tense and strife-torn were Charles’ days in July. He was extinguishing the naval mutiny on the one hand, as he desperately strove to reach agreement with the Scots on the other. It is inconceivable that he should at this point have taken time off to contract a highly unsuitable – and secret – marriage. Charles was, on the contrary, only too aware that in a dwindling hand of cards his marriageabi
lity constituted about his only remaining ace. His parents, one way or another, had been attempting to play this card to their advantage since his childhood, as Dutch princesses, Spanish and Portuguese infantas, were considered; Charles was well aware of his own value in this respect. Indeed, when he finally elected to play the ace, after his Restoration, he did so after a very cool estimate of the advantages to himself which would thus accrue.

  There is negative evidence on Lucy’s side as well. Her liaison with Charles continued sporadically until 1650. Now known as Mrs Barlow, she was with him in Paris, witnessed by Evelyn, and possibly in Jersey. Thence she passed into other hands. Charles himself was absent from her side for nearly two years while he was in Scotland and England; during this time her second child, Mary, was born. Furthermore, Lucy contemplated wedding Sir Henry de Vic, the English resident in Brussels, with the full approval of Charles – an insane move, if she was actually proposing to commit bigamy.

  For others than the lighthearted Lucy, life at The Hague that September had its complications and anxieties. In the streets, the followers of Prince Rupert and those of the pro-Scottish John Colepeper began to battle. Their feud was by no means ended by the failure of the summer’s naval expedition. It was a particular piece of ill-fortune that at this critical juncture Prince Charles should be laid low by smallpox, since he represented the one figure of authority that everyone tacitly agreed to respect.

  Hyde was back at his side. He had arrived at The Hague, exhausted from sea-sickness, having tried in vain to catch up with his Prince in France. But Hyde continued to preach against the Scottish involvement. On hearing of the previous Lauderdale agreement, disrupted by circumstances, he wrote to Henrietta Maria that, if another such concordat was proposed, he would have to move to another part of her service. He was thus hardly a figure of reconciliation.

  The Prince, who still managed to appear in this attractive role, was out of action until November. On recovery, his first task was to sort out those same disorderly sailors, who were now drinking and rioting their way about the port of Rotterdam, to the general discontent of the Dutch and the English civilian exiles alike. Some crews actually returned with their vessels to the Parliamentary side; others were recaptured. Charles’ method of dealing with them was to make the uncompromising Prince Rupert their admiral, and that despite a few remaining demands for the appointment of the Duke of York. Rupert’s name has come down to our day trailing chivalric garlands: in his own time he was known less charmingly as ‘Prince Robber’. He was certainly a man of action. Once he had thrown a mutineer or two overboard with his own hands, the Royalist Navy reluctantly recognized itself to be under control once more. With his brother Maurice as Vice-Admiral, Rupert set about restoring the reputation of the Navy as a striking force. The pair of Palatine princes captured a number of prizes, which helped to swell the pathetically depleted exchequer of the Prince of Wales.

  But there had been vital months of delay and indecision. And time and tide round Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight had not waited for this happy resolution of the Royalist naval problems. Divisions between Parliament and Army grew daily more pronounced. One was represented by corrupt and often inefficient members, who nevertheless could still claim legality behind their authority; the other by the soldiers victorious in the recent war, who could and did claim right as well as might. There was hardly likely to be accord between them. In any case, the King still hoped to divide and so to rule again. On 18 September a Parliamentary delegation arrived at Newport on the Isle of Wight in a final effort to negotiate with him according to their notions of compromise. They were animated not only by a wish to fend off the encroachments of the Army on their own authority, but also, being principally Presbyterians, by a desire to subdue the Army’s religious Independents.

  The King showed himself in principle prepared to make concessions, but understandably refused to deny pardon to Princes Rupert and Maurice and certain other designated Royalists. As ever, he spoke up firmly for the use of bishops as a system of church government: ‘Episcopacy,’ he said, ‘had been exercised by the Apostles.’ Although these abortive negotiations were known as the Treaty of Newport in the language of the time, no such treaty in our sense ever existed. And the King made it clear in a private letter to the Duke of Ormonde that he had no intention of honouring it even if it had been concluded: Ormonde should pay no attention, he wrote, if he ever read of such an agreement.

  In any case, Parliament itself was scarcely more constant. In October it rejected those terms already agreed, although negotiations were still in progress. As for the attitude of the Army, Cromwell lingered in Scotland. He had arrived as an invader, but then discovered the more pacific delights of theological conversation in Edinburgh.

  People cannot help their personal predilections, although they may conceal them. It was one of Charles’ difficulties that the Scots were naturally distasteful to him. But they were naturally agreeable to the English Independent general. Cromwell might fight the Scots, but he would always be able to strike up accord with them afterwards. To Cromwell, the Scots were not after all such bad fellows, particularly the Covenanters, like Argyll, who had not been involved in the recent holocaust. With Charles, the process was in exact reverse. He might make any number of agreements with them. But in his heart of hearts he could never like or even admire them. It is possible that during this Scottish sojourn of Cromwell’s delicate feelers were put out, like the exploratory touch of a cat’s paw, concerning the future of the King. If – only if – it came to a trial and if – only if – such a trial brought about a death sentence, how would the Scots …? But Argyll to his dying day strenuously denied that any kind of pledge of complaisance towards their King’s execution was given in advance by the Scots.

  In the meantime of course the safety of the King was a subject of agonizing concern, rather than diplomatic feelers, to his wife and family abroad. Why not rescue him? There existed a force of upwards of a thousand Lorrainers: could this not be used to raid the Isle of Wight, as Henrietta Maria and Lord Jermyn continued to hope? The idea sounded more practicable than it actually was. There was the problem of transport. The Isle of Wight was distant, the Parliamentary Navy effective, and, since the King’s guards did not intend that there should be another precipitate flight, there would be no connivance this time. Moreover, the King himself had given his parole, his word of honour, that he would not escape. He did not – as yet – consider himself to be absolved from that promise.

  Towards the end of November, the Prince of Wales decided that the Lorrainer troops would be used to better effect trying to capture nearby Guernsey and issued a commission to that effect. In general, he was trying to rally the Royalist forces, and provide them with some kind of unified animus parallel to the inspiration of the Roundhead Army in time of war. Charles made efforts to work up an equivalent campaign: the Cavalier Soldier’s Vade-Mecum, printed in 1648 at his command, contains a number of prayers and psalms for use by Royalist soldiers. It is, ironically, highly derivative from Roundhead propaganda, and the psalms include Cromwell’s favourite, to be used as the Parliamentarian battle-cry at Dunbar: ‘For the Lord of Hosts is with us: the God of Jacob is our refuge.’

  However the ‘Prayer before a March or Battle’ was applicable only to the Cavaliers: ‘It is not Ambition, or Malice, that hath thrust us into this posture, but the necessary defence of thy Church, thy Truth, our Laws, our Liberties. …’ Here was the voice of King Charles I, not Cromwell. And the King himself was to be the subject of prayer in order to alleviate ‘his long and bitter sufferings’. Charles’ own position was acknowledged in a prayer for his specific benefit, beginning, ‘Almighty God, who do’st establish thrones of Princes, and the succession in those thrones, by giving thy judgements to the King, and thy righteousness to the King’s son …’3

  As far as Charles was concerned, it was not empty compliment. Indeed, it could be argued that the King’s son at this point was showing not only righteousness, but
also a degree of judgement lacking in the counsels of his father. The Prince of Wales tried to maintain an element of stability in an increasingly unstable situation; unfortunately, his ignorance of developments on the other side of the Channel, due to lack of intelligence and a general news black-out, was profound. His father’s letters, written to him at the end of November, did not arrive into the Prince’s hands until late in December; then their text was poignant rather than relevant.

  There was often a gap of some weeks between some epoch-making dénouement in England and the Prince of Wales hearing what had taken place. One striking example of this was Colonel Pride’s forcible purge of Parliament on 6 December. All those members who did not bow to the Army’s increasingly radical demands – including the trial of the King – were ejected: a ‘rump’ of under sixty members was left. This meant that the Army leaders, including Oliver Cromwell, the victor of the Second Civil War newly returned from Scotland, and his son-in-law Henry Ireton, were in virtual control, with the aid of this Rump Parliament to carry out their behests. On the day of Pride’s Purge the King was taking freezing walks along the shore of the Solent, Henrietta Maria crouched in poverty and misery at the equally cold palace of Saint-Germain, and Charles himself was by now at Breda, an ancient stronghold at the confluence of the Mark and the Pra, just north of today’s Belgian border. He had decided to make the move, as the situation in Holland grew increasingly impossible. For all the amity of the Prince of Orange, an individual, even a royal one, could do little. The Dutch were embarrassed and slightly hostile.