King Charles II

by Fraser, Antonia

  PART THREE

  This Golden Age

  Great Sir, the Star which at your happy Birth Joy’d with his Beams (at Noon) the wandering earth; Did with auspicious lustre then presage The glittering plenty of this Golden age….

  EVE OF CORONATION ADDRESS TO CHARLES II, 1661

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Noah’s Dove

  ‘At which Time he prov’d himself the Noah’s Dove, that finding no Rest anywhere, was receiv’d again into his own Ark, and brought a peaceable Olive-Leaf in his mouth.’

  Aurelian Cook, Titus Britannicus

  At Dover on 25 May 1660 the flags waved, the trumpets blew, and high above the heads of the crowd vast indications of new glories could be seen: the royal arms, publicly flaunted in joy.

  On the sea voyage, however, the King himself deliberately turned his thoughts back to the past. He was, as usual, physically ‘active and stirring’, striding up and down the deck. But his conversation was of old times.1 He talked, almost gossiped, of that flight after Worcester: it was a significant recitation. For the King was speaking not so much to Samuel Pepys, making notes at his side, as to himself. This King, who was about to be restored, never intended to let himself forget what he had endured – and might one day have to endure again. Thus he dwelt consciously on the nadir of his fortunes, where other men might have been puffed up with contemplation of the future.

  Not that life on board was all retrospection. Before they sailed there had been pleasanter diversions, such as the renaming of the royal ships, to rescue them from their unpleasant Protectoral nomenclature. This probably took place on the quarter-deck table ‘under the awning’: thus the Richard (Cromwell) became the James (Duke of York), the Speaker (of the House of Commons) became the Mary (Princess of Orange) and the Dunbar (oh hateful Scottish word!) the Henry (for the Duke of Gloucester). Pepys, like many of those suddenly enjoying intimate contact with royalty, allowed himself to be charmed by such evidence of the King’s humanity as the fact that his dogs were busy making messes on the deck, just like any other dogs. Finally, at the King’s suggestion, the three royal brothers, Charles, James and Henry, tucked into a seaman’s breakfast of pork, pease and boiled beef.

  The King was rowed ashore about three o’clock in the afternoon in the Admiral’s barge: Pepys followed in a smaller boat which included one of Charles’ errant dogs, escorted by a footman. Once on dry land, Charles, with his usual tactful sense of occasion, knelt down and thanked God for his safe arrival. And he continued to acknowledge the divine course of his salvation when the Mayor of Dover presented him with a rich Bible.

  It was, said the King promptly, ‘the thing he loved above all other things in the world’.

  General Monck’s claims to have assisted the Almighty in bringing out this happy state of affairs were not mentioned. But then they scarcely needed to be. Monck was the first to receive the King, with all obeisance and honour. And now it was time for the ordnance to speak. The thunder started with guns and cannons there in Dover, and spread all the way to Tower Hill in London, just as the bonfires sprang from hill to hill, from town to town, a sight commemorated by Abraham Cowley:

  All England but one Bonfire seems to be,

  One Aetna shooting flames into the sea.

  But it was the ordnance which impressed the King. Indeed, so dominant did the sheer noise of his reception become that it would become the principal theme of the King’s commentary upon it. As he told his sister Henriette-Anne in a letter the next day, ‘My head is so prodigiously dazed by the acclamation of the people … that I know not whether I am writing sense or no.’2

  From Dover Charles went on to Canterbury, and from thence to Rochester. He took his time in treading the triumphal route, now lined by the local militia of Kent, as well as more gracefully strewn with herbs by Kentish maidens. The dalliance at Canterbury included Sunday service in the ancient cathedral, the first meeting of his new Privy Council and the presentation of the Garter to General Monck. All these events could as well have taken place in London. But the King’s thirtieth birthday was imminent. It was part of the perfect timing of things, the way everything now fell into place with such marvellous felicity, that the King would be able to take possession of his capital on such an auspicious day.

  At Rochester King Charles deserted his coach for horseback, and it was on horseback that he greeted the Army, drawn up for his benefit – or perhaps as a reminder of the source of his power – by Monck at Blackheath. It was on horseback too that he saluted the more pacific Morris dancers who gambolled on the heath. It was on horseback and bareheaded, riding between his two brothers, all three in silver doublets, that on Tuesday, 29 May, the King finally entered the capital. Met by the Lord Mayor at Deptford, he first rode through the borough of Southwark and then, preceded by the Mayor, crossed London Bridge. So clogged was the structure with wooden houses on both sides, that the royal party had to be content with a twelve-foot passage, while heralds and maids and other attendants milled about them. None of this diminished the general ecstasy. As John Evelyn, the Anglican and former exile, wrote in his Diary of the spectacle on Restoration Day, ‘I stood in the Strand and beheld it and blessed God.’3

  It was of course the King that the populace crowded to see. But the pomp of this first royal procession indicated that King Charles II did not intend to return as a suppliant exile – more as ‘the Chiefest Ray of Lustre to all this Splendid Triumph’.4 Not only a monarchy but a whole way of life was being restored. The cortège which reached London included three hundred gentlemen in doublets of cloth of silver, and an equivalent number in velvet coats, accompanied by footmen and lackeys in purple liveries and other uniforms of sea-green and silver. The buff coats of the soldiers evoked now no painful memories of the Civil War, adorned as they were with sleeves of cloth of silver, and other trimmings of silver lace. To this spectacle of affluence was joined that of the Sheriff’s men in their red cloaks and still more silver lace, the gentlemen from the London companies, opulent in velvet coats and golden chains, the Aldermen of London in scarlet gowns also richly adorned.

  The noise remained fulminating. It was a noise of guns and cannon, the bells which never stopped, the clattering of the soldiers and their horses, but above all the noise of the people – over twenty thousand of them, laughing, shouting and crying and jostling to see the King coming into his own. That day and night they were all Royalists. The streets literally flowed with wine: the Venetian Ambassador kept a perpetual supply on tap outside his house. It was seven o’clock in the evening before the King, surrounded by this happy tumult, reached Whitehall.

  Here he was addressed by the Speakers of both Houses of Parliament. The Earl of Manchester, for the peers, began his address in a style which was almost ludicrously obsequious: ‘Dread Sovereign!’ he cried, ‘I offer no flattering titles, but speak the words of Truth: you are the desire of three Kingdoms, the strength and stay of the Tribes of the People, for the moderating of Extremities, the reconciling of Differences, the satisfying of all Interests’, and so forth and so on.5 Yet it was true, as Manchester proceeded to point out, that the great magnates of the realm had found the destiny of the peerage had been peculiarly linked to the monarchy’s own: the House of Lords had been abolished just after the execution of King Charles I, and, despite some Cromwellian experiments, had not really found its place again in the constitution in any proper form.

  The King’s ‘Gracious answer’, as it was afterwards described, was very short. To excuse its brevity, he said that he was disorientated by his journey and above all by the noise still sounding in his ears; but ‘I confess [it] was pleasing to me, because it expressed the affections of my people,’ the King quickly added.6

  The oration of the Speaker of the House of Commons, delivered in the Banqueting Hall, took much longer. At the end of it the King was forced to acknowledge that he was so exhausted that he could hardly speak, but all the same wished the Speaker to know that ‘whatsoever may concern the good of this peop
le, I shall be as ready to grant as you shall be able to ask’. He was certainly too tired to attend a Thanksgiving service at Westminster Abbey, so that a shorter service was held in the Presence Chamber. At the end of it all the King still had to dine ceremoniously in public, showing himself to his people at his food, as his ancestors had always done.

  Was the weary King solaced nonetheless by his mistress Barbara Palmer? Legend had it so. And for once, in view of the birth of Barbara’s daughter Anne, almost exactly nine months later, on 25 February 1661, the legend seems perfectly plausible. It is true that Barbara’s husband, Roger Palmer, did acknowledge Anne as his own at the actual time of her birth, either because he was hoodwinked by Barbara into doing so, or because he chose to turn a blind eye to an unpleasant situation in order to preserve his marriage. But as Anne grew up, her royal paternity became quite obvious. She was officially designated the King’s daughter at the time of her marriage, created Countess of Sussex in her own right, and, with Charlotte Countess of Lichfield, Barbara’s second daughter by the King, came to form an important part of his inner family circle.

  To return to the legend, it would have been quite in character for the King to have relaxed in Barbara’s arms after his triumphant if noisy processional: even if one cannot prove that he did so. Certainly he was in a high good humour at the time, giving vent to one of those wry, self-mocking observations at which he excelled. Turning to those about him with a smile, King Charles remarked that it was undoubtedly his own fault that he had been absent so long, since he had met no-one ‘who did not protest that he had ever wished for his return’.

  The man the crowds cheered through London on his thirtieth birthday was an engaging but not a merry monarch. This is confirmed by all contemporary accounts. For one thing, Charles II was no longer young by the standards of the time. (He was in fact over half-way through his own life, but of course the average life expectancy of the time was far less than sixty.) His appearance had much changed from those far-off days when Cromwell was wont to refer to him jocularly as ‘the young man’ and ‘the young gentleman’. Sir Samuel Tuke, in a character of Charles II written to coincide with his Restoration, referred to the fact that his face, which had been ‘very lovely’ until he was twenty, had now become grave and even severe in repose, although much softened when he spoke. One witness of the royal procession commented on Charles II’s new resemblance to his father, calling him ‘black and very slender faced’.7

  Undoubtedly his face was much leaner. The nose too had markedly lengthened. Already the characteristic deep lines which are seen in all the later portraits had formed from nostril to chin, curving round the wide mouth. They are already visible in a portrait painted towards the end of his exile, and praised by Pepys for being ‘the most pleasant’ and ‘the most like him that I ever saw picture in my life’,8 as well as the many engravings commemorating the Restoration. Sometimes attributed to debauchery, these particular lines were more likely caused by the tribulations of exile.

  In general, it was majesty, not youth, which supplied the charm of his appearance. ‘You may read the King in every lineament’ was the general verdict on his face. His tall figure, ‘so exactly formed that the most curious eye cannot find any error in his shape’, was as appropriate in a monarch as it had been inappropriate in a fugitive; its symmetry commanded universal admiration, as did his fine long legs and shapely hands.9 Once again, there was favourable comment on his shining black hair, which had not yet started to go grey: surprisingly, for his father’s black hair had silvered prematurely. The Plea Roll portrait of Michaelmas 1661 shows the curly black moustache which he preserved to the end of his life (Charles, unlike his father, was never bearded), the mass of black hair and heavy black brows which together gave a saturnine cast to his countenance – the exact word used by his contemporaries. However, even Charles was not to enjoy his thick black locks for long: three years later he went in his turn ‘mighty grey’ and adopted a periwig in consequence like everyone else.10

  The King’s other good feature, his ‘quick and sparkling’ eyes, attracted attention. But behind the sparkle, the expression remained watchful. And the King’s habitual demeanour on his return was grave. As Pepys put it, ‘The King seems to be a very sober man’; it was the fourteen-year-old George Boddington who ran back to his father after witnessing the procession and reported that the restored monarch was ‘a black grim man’.11

  And gravity, even temperance, was the keynote of the character now presented to his loyal subjects. An Eikon Basilike of Charles II (imitating the title of the famous book ascribed to his martyred father), published within a few months of his landing in England and probably written by Sir Richard Fanshawe, gives an interesting sidelight on the image of the new reigning monarch. Here Charles was inevitably credited with such sterling qualities as good judgement and apprehension, magnanimity and public-mindedness, as well as sheer goodness. (He was more good than great, as one phrase had it, contrasting Charles le Bon and Charlemagne: that recalled his father’s last letter.) But the King was also presented as having ‘sobriety and temperance’: his diet spare, his attire plain, his recreations moderate, and his speech sober – a detail incidentally confirmed by Sir Samuel Tuke, who remarked how the King never swore.12fn1

  It was hardly surprising if the new King was at heart sober, serious, even melancholy, rather than merry. Here was a man who had been undergoing harrowing experiences since boyhood: including his father’s death, his family’s poverty and his own humiliation. He had known, in Dante’s words,

  sì come sa di sale

  Lo pane altrui, e com’ è duro calle

  Lo scendere e ’l salir per l’ altrui scale

  (‘the salt flavour of other’s people’s bread, the hard path up and down other people’s stairs’). He had endured all this. He had never given up. Nevertheless, it is useless to pretend that this ‘black grim man’ was the same brave boy of Edgehill, or even the spirited general on the eve of Worcester fight. It was not that King Charles II never intended to feel again: as we shall see, he remained, admirably, a feeling man all his life, full of affectionate impulses, one of which (towards his wife) would bedevil the monarchy’s future. But this was in private.

  In public, he was determined never to be subjected again to the experience of humiliation, accompanied by helplessness. With this resolution went the presentation of a public mask of cynicism, gaiety, indifference – it could take many forms, according to the interpretation of the beholders. Behind the mask lay a melancholy which nothing, not all the fabled delights of the Restoration Court, quite dislodged.

  But of course, this melancholy coexisted easily with an iron determination to preserve what was his, now wrested back from unlawful hands. Charles II believed passionately that monarchy was the rightful government of Britain: this conviction was built into his personal philosophy by his upbringing and had been welded there solidly by the death of his father. It was not a purely selfish view: of course he did not intend to go on his travels again, but he also, less personally and less selfishly, did not intend that his country should suffer again, as it had suffered so cruelly in the Civil War.

  In the same way, an underlying melancholy was compatible with, and even inspired, a degree of doubt about the country which was now welcoming him with such rapture. He felt himself to be somewhat of an expert on the changeability of crowds. It was in keeping with the King’s suspicions that he prided himself on being able to read people’s characters from their faces, having studied the subject in a book – Physonomia, by G. B. della Porta.13 As he searched the smiling visages of those surrounding him at this ‘continuous Jubilee’, he was aware of the darker passions which lay concealed – and which might return. It is tempting to suppose that King Charles enjoyed at least one day of unalloyed happiness as monarch – Restoration Day. But did he in fact do so? Is there not in all his remarks and behaviour on that auspicious occasion, including the quip that it was undoubtedly his own fault he had been away so long
, a note of amiable but unmistakable caution?

  As the bells rang out and finally died away, the myriad bonfires were reduced to ashes, the King remained wary. Outwardly, he could and would forgive the past – except for those directly involved in his father’s murder. Even then he showed himself more merciful than those around him. The corpses of Cromwell, Ireton and Bradshaw (President of the court which tried Charles I) were exhumed and publicly hung at Tyburn, a gesture which did but little harm to the deceased. Of the forty-one surviving regicides, those who had signed the warrant and a few others closely associated with the King’s death as well as the two (unidentified) executioners of Charles I, twelve died altogether. It was the King who prevented a further nineteen of their number, those who had given themselves up, from being pursued by the law; he told Hyde that while he could not pardon them, he was ‘weary of hanging’.14 He did not save Argyll in Scotland, but then Argyll was responsible for the death of Montrose; Sir Henry Vane, who also died, was charged with treason against Charles II rather than against Charles I.

  The judicial process which brought the regicides to book was a great deal fairer than that allowed to King Charles I, since the prisoners were patiently heard in their own defence, and, in general, the rules of contemporary justice were observed. Charles was present at some of the executions, but John Evelyn put his attendance in the correct perspective. The executions were performed, he wrote, to avenge the murder of King Charles I and in the presence of ‘the King his son, whom they also sought to kill’. Otherwise Charles II, never a personally vindictive man, proved himself ‘no Orestes’.15