King Charles II

by Fraser, Antonia

  Pepys’ reportage of the situation in February 1660 is as vivid as any: ‘Boys do now cry “Kiss my Parliament” instead of “Kiss my arse” so great and general contempt is the Rump come to among all men, good and bad,’ he wrote. A few days later there were thirty-one bonfires to be seen at one glance at the Strand bridge: and everywhere ‘rumps’ (of beef) were being roasted. One notes the progress in Pepys’ Diary, from the man who showed him a clandestine Lion and Unicorn at the back of his chimney on 5 March, to the prevalent clamour on 16 March when people were beginning to ‘talk loud of the king’.22 It was on that date that the Rump finally dissolved itself, and a free election was announced – although a last-ditch attempt was unsuccessfully made to block the sons of former Royalists from standing. By the end of March, effigies of King Charles were being made.

  Yet the continued uncertainty of the times is revealed in Hyde’s correspondence. As late as 4 February he was worried over Monck’s ‘lewd carriage’: if he continued to show himself so obstinate, they might still have to owe their recovery to a foreign army….23 And Monck continued to play his cards close to his chest, denying publicly that he had any intention of acting for ‘Charles Steward’. The fiction, as we must believe it to be, was to be preserved a little longer. A more revealing glimpse of the way things were blowing was given by the behaviour of Ashley Cooper. Despite the fact that he had been pursued ardently by the Royalists in tempting correspondence, Ashley Cooper had continued to reject their overtures. He appeared deaf to the personal appeals of the King. He had been elected to the Council of State by the Rump, although he was of the majority of the Council who refused to accept the additional clause renouncing Charles Stuart, proposed by Desborough. But it was not until February 1660 that he allowed himself to be drawn into correspondence with the exiled court, as we know from Hyde’s complaints on the subject.

  When on 24 February Lady Willoughby de Broke told Hyde that Ashley Cooper was ‘his Majesty’s fast friend’, Hyde replied tartly that this was the first he had heard of it. Nearly twenty years later, when Ashley Cooper (transformed into the Earl of Shaftesbury) came to the conclusion that the monarchy had once more failed, he referred to his own feelings about the Restoration of 1660. He had discerned ‘the hand of Providence’ in the fact that there had been various forms of government, and several types of men in power, yet to none of them had Providence granted ‘a heart to use it as they should’. For all Hyde’s understandable fears and cautions, Providence was by now firmly pointing in the direction of Charles Stuart.

  And that pejorative name itself was no longer heard. Hyde was assured that those formerly most against King Charles would now present themselves with halters round their necks and yield to his mercy. The cry was all: ‘A King, a King!’24

  At Brussels the King, now being acclaimed, continued to play the hand superbly – that is to say, with an air of universal friendliness. He told Mordaunt, for example, that the Royalists must take particular care not to ‘discountenance anybody who may be made to do good service’, for the sake of private jealousies or animosities amongst themselves. Of a warring pair, he observed, ‘It may be they may both do me the more service even from … their dislike of each other.’ Yet, in common with the rest of the court at Brussels, he was of course following the English news with bated breath. On 24 March he told Lord Jermyn (now created Earl of St Albans for his faithful service to Queen Henrietta Maria) that a report had come via Calais of a vote being passed in Parliament for ‘King, Lords and Commons’.25 It was premature. Yet such rumours were easily spread in the atmosphere of rising excitement in which they were living.

  On 27 March King Charles sent Monck a letter which was in itself a masterpiece of tact: it was certainly the kind of missive which his father had never learnt to write.26 First he paid diplomatic tribute to Monck’s demonstrably strong position in England: ‘I know too well the power you have to do me good or harm, not to desire you should be my friend.’ Then King Charles protested his own desire for peace and happiness – in words which do have a gleam of his characteristic humour: ‘And whatever you have heard to the contrary, you will find to be as false as if you had been told that I have white hair and am crooked.’ There is a blandness too about the King’s phrase of desiring to secure ‘all good men’ in the possession of ‘what belongs to them’. Who these good men might be, and in what those belongings might consist, was left charmingly vague: yet these would of course be two of the most vexed points concerning the Restoration settlement, as in the aftermath of any civil war.

  King Charles ended on a note of enormous warmth: ‘However I cannot but say, that I will take all the ways I can, to let the world see, and you and yours find, that I have an entire trust in you, and as much kindness for you, as can be expressed by Your affectionate friend. Charles R.’ As a result Charles received from Monck at the end of March a piece of kindly advice in the form of a secret message: to remain at Brussels, under Catholic sovereignty, when Spain and England were also officially at war, would be imprudent. As once before, the King retreated to the useful quasi-neutral town of Breda. He had absolutely no wish to show himself imprudent – now.

  It was thus from Breda that on 4 April King Charles wrote formally to the Speaker of the House of Commons. On the same day he gave out the Declaration of Breda. The letter to the Speaker was a triumph of double-think, far in advance of his communication to Monck.27 It referred constantly to the need for Parliaments, and how the presence of a monarch was justified by his role in preserving them. Ghosts must have danced – not only that of his father, but also of Strafford, and even of Oliver Cromwell. But King Charles II was able to observe unblushingly that their mutual liberties and authorities – King and Parliament – were ‘best preserved by preserving the other’.

  ‘We look on you,’ wrote the King, ‘as wise and dispassionate men and good patriots, who will raise up those banks and fences which have been cast down.’ And he boasted of the Protestantism from which he had not swerved. There was only one drum-beat of revenge – his pointed allusion to his father’s death. That ‘crying sin’ he believed that they would be quite as anxious to avenge as he was himself, being equally ‘solicitous’ to redeem the nation from ‘that guilt and infamy’. Yet he ended on a note which still has the power to touch one, in view of the trials he had endured in the previous ten years: ‘And we hope that we have made that right Christian use of our affliction, and that the observations and experience we have had in other countries hath been such as that we, and we hope all our subjects, shall be the better for what we have seen and suffered.’

  The Declaration of Breda was largely the work of Hyde. Unlike the King’s letter to Parliament, it was a deliberately bold document. First it granted a free and full pardon to anyone appealing to the King for his ‘grace and favour’ within forty days, with only a few exceptions to be decided by Parliament. The thought of the regicides continued to outrage the King. Otherwise no-one would be punished for their behaviour to either Charles I or Charles II; nor would their properties be touched.

  Even more strikingly, the Declaration of Breda referred to the ‘passion and uncharitableness of the times’ which had resulted in many differences in religion. The King promised, via an Act of Parliament, ‘a liberty to tender consciences’. No man was to be in future ‘disquieted or called in question’ for differences in religion, so long as these differences did not threaten the peace of the kingdom. Alas, for the Act of Parliament: it was not to be. Nevertheless, the intention at least in that brave happy April was there. Furthermore, it was for Parliament to deal with all the various transactions concerning property, inevitable after ‘so many years, and so many and so great revolutions’. Last of all, the arrears of pay of the Army and its officers, under Monck, should be paid.

  The Declaration of Breda was a remarkable piece of clemency combined with statecraft, the latter largely springing from the former. But these were remarkable times: King Charles II at Breda was living through a situation wh
ich even in his wildest fantasies of exile he cannot have envisaged. By mid-April in England it was reported by one of Hyde’s young relations, an apprentice in the City, that ‘those formerly called Cavaliers begin to appear in garbe fit for gentlemen, and their masters “turn tide”’. About the end of April there was actually a muster in Hyde Park, with trumpets sounding through the streets: the cry was heard loud and without fear that ‘the King shall enjoy his own again’.28 Through all this festivity, Lambert, the former darling general, whose daughter only a brief six months ago had been contemplated as a bride for the King, was brought as a prisoner. By the end of April too, Buckingham, a most reliable guide to the way the wind was blowing, was wearing his Garter in public.

  It was on 1 May that Charles’ letter and the Declaration of Breda were officially read out in the House of Commons. And on the same auspicious day – a day of national mirth and rejoicing which the Puritans had tried hard to obliterate – the House of Commons passed an official resolution to desire Charles to take the government of the kingdom upon his shoulders.

  Most remarkable of all these remarkable events was the fact that not one single condition was suggested, let alone imposed upon the King. The storm of revolution had blown itself out so thoroughly that those Presbyterians reported by Pepys as wanting to bring back Charles tied by such conditions ‘as if he had been in chains’ could find not the slightest support. Instead, the scenes on May Day itself were so ecstatic as to turn Pepys’ stomach. He witnessed people actually drinking the King’s health on their knees in the streets, which he described as ‘a little too much’.29

  Well might King Charles be reminded of that lucky star which was said to have attended his birth. As the Estates of Zeeland put it, ‘If Great Britain hath made bon-fires at the birth of your Majesty, what should it do now in this marvellous conjuncture?’ He decided to move on from Breda to The Hague, in order the better to receive the delegation of Parliamentary Commissioners who were coming to offer him the government of his own kingdom.30 The journey was made by water. Charles was offered the barge of the Dowager Princess of Orange for the occasion (o tempora, o mores, O Henrietta Catharine), but chose instead a larger vessel. It was in fact a jaght schip (hunt ship), a name anglicized as ‘yacht’. He liked it so much that he decided to order one for himself, and was subsequently presented by the Estates with an identical copy named the Mary. Other members of the court and royal family also embarked in borrowed yachts.

  James Duke of York was in charge of the whole expedition, and saw to it that there were sufficient kitchens in the floating cortège of thirteen yachts for meals of up to twenty dishes to be served aboard (O Cologne, O Bruges, O vanished austerity of yesteryear!). Unfortunately, Princess Mary, who had a capacity for untimely suffering, was badly sea-sick, which upset the journey. Nevertheless, when the royal party reached Delft, there was a vast crowd waiting to see ‘this miraculous prince’, despite the hour – it was dawn. The continuing volleys of the musketeers and the heavy explosions of the cannon became quite irritating to the royal ears: so quickly can a pleasure based on novelty pall.

  Yet such petty complaints soon faded away in the bright stream of experiences, each one more wonderful than the next, which now came the King’s way. It was a precious and solemn moment when Sir John Grenville asked to present the letters of the House of Commons, not least because he employed with veneration the sacred title of ‘majesty’, ‘which not long since was the aversion of varlets and fanaticks’. The King, for his part, graciously did find his way to accepting the invitation to return…. In general, the Commissioners of Parliament satisfied everyone with their becoming reverence; it was agreed that the reference of Denzil Holles, that old parliamentary warhorse, to the twenty years’ tyranny of Cromwell was most moving. It was touching too that amongst those who were received at this point were the master and captain of the ship which had transported the King to France after Worcester.

  By the time the Speaker of the House of Commons received the royal acceptance, he was already dwelling in a capital where euphoria was breaking out on all sides. ‘Our Bells and our Bonfires, and the report of our Artillery have already begun to proclaim the King and to publish our Joy,’ observed the Speaker.

  And at The Hague too these were never-to-be-forgotten days. The ‘wonderful changes which were almost daily produced’ in England had taken Europe by surprise. The Spaniards in particular, the King’s laggard allies, found that ‘His Majesty was almost in his own country’ before they had taken in that there was ‘any Revolution’ towards it. They hastened to take advantage of his presence at The Hague before it was too late. All was sweetness and light – and honeyed invitation. There were rival French and Spanish dinner-parties to toast the future ruler. The Catholic-Irish clique joined with the Spanish-French clique in seeking promises of Catholic toleration for the future.

  As for the petitions, the letters, the reminders of favours and loyalties past, the pleas for forgiveness of (regrettable but surely explicable) disloyalties – these all flowed in a happy, bubbling current towards the person of the twenty-nine-year-old King. Again, it was hardly surprising that amidst such amiable sycophancy Charles was in ‘the best of humour that ever he was seen to be’. It would have been paradoxical indeed for the man who had kept such resolute public cheerfulness throughout the dark times of exile, to have turned the corners of his mouth down now.

  King Charles on the contrary enjoyed himself to the full, his enjoyment only enhanced by a nice personal sense of the irony of things. He touched, constantly, for the King’s evil, that strange mediaeval ritual which he had also performed in hiding at Moseley. Then the act had been a desperate confirmation that he was still King. Now it was an agreeable gesture to please others, not himself. He was pleased to receive from the States of Holland a magnificent bed which had been intended for his sister Mary’s accouchement, but had been stored when the news came of her husband’s death a few days before. And his nine-year-old nephew William of Orange, the baby deprived of the bed, rode wonderingly in the King’s cortège as it passed through The Hague – although even now the States of Holland tried to avoid any diplomatic situation where William of Orange (Charles’ nephew, but a prince in his own right) might rank behind James Duke of York and Henry Duke of Gloucester, the King’s brothers. The complicated juxtaposition of Orange and Stuart remained to plague the new reign.

  A happier omen, from Charles’ point of view, could be discerned in the presence of a laughing young woman named Barbara. She had been born Barbara Villiers, a cousin of the Duke of Buckingham, and was married to a Catholic Royalist named Roger Palmer; but she was already in the months before the Restoration contributing in her own way to the King’s royal good humour. Of less cheerful links with the past, poor Lucy Walter had died in Paris a year back. The King’s son, James Crofts, now renamed Fitzroy, remained in the care of Queen Henrietta Maria. There, with his grandmother, the handsome, engaging young man had his head thoroughly turned. That too was an omen for the future.

  Throughout all this period, the King and his train were wined and dined in a series of banquets whose gorgeous dishes were intended to indicate the exceptional warmth everyone had now discovered they felt for the English Court. Sauces steamed continuously by day and by night: pheasants were employed in one particular collation, with the lavishness of salt and pepper. In all this, stories of assassination plots and of the sabotage of the King’s ship seemed to come out of a remote unpleasant past. They were correctly dismissed as malicious rumours.

  The final banquet was given by the States of Holland. The King had his aunt Elizabeth of Bohemia on his right, his sister Mary on his left. Was he bored by the eternal junketings? One doubts it. A Danish observer noted that all through the courtyard and up the stairs of the house where Charles was now lodged, there were Englishmen kneeling to their king.31 No one knew better than Charles II, for all his restlessness in the face of protocol, that the alternative to royal ceremony was very often royal flight.
Hyde wrote in his History of this marvellous period, ‘In this wonderful manner and with this miraculous expedition, did God put an end in one month … to a rebellion that had raged near twenty years.’ In May 1660 Charles was acutely aware that what had been built up in one little month, could be as easily and in as short a time destroyed again. So he sat through the endless ceremonies, and with good grace.

  Now the good ship Royal Charles was riding at anchor and waiting to convey him towards England herself. (It had, as a matter of fact, only just stopped being the good ship Naseby.) A hundred pounds of roast beef had been put aboard, and silver plate to serve it on. Everything – at last – was to be fit for a king.

  Thus from the Belgick States delicious seat

  Triumphantly departed Charles the Great!

  cried the poet William Lower, who was in attendance on the scene and noted every detail. That night of 23 May more than fifty thousand people went to watch the departure of the English King. But in fact there was no night; the torches and flares of the royal equipage illuminated the darkness. The drums beat a heavy and continuous assembly. Mary Princess of Orange broke down in tears and the tender-hearted Charles wept in sympathy.

  The sea was calm, the heavens clear. Charles Stuart, the second, went up onto the poop of the ship to take a last look at Holland. It was also to be his last true sight of foreign parts. For the rest of his life he would not set foot outside England again. The King was coming into his own.

  1 In view of Mary’s concentration on the subject, it should be recorded that she never did have to yield her proud position as eldest daughter of the King of England to her brother’s wife: by the time Charles II married, Mary was dead.

  2 This nickname, familiar to us from historical fiction, such as Margaret Irwin’s A Royal Cinderella, survives in fact in a few letters from the King. Otherwise, Charles always referred to Henriette-Anne in letters as ‘his dear sister’ and even ‘his dear dear sister’. It has been suggested that it was Charles’ baby name for her, only recalled in his most affectionate moments.14 To her mother Henrietta Maria she was always ‘ma fille’. Later we shall know Henriette-Anne under her married title of Madame de France.