King Charles II

by Fraser, Antonia

  It was happy for him that the English ship-building industry itself made prodigious advances during his reign. At first, the industry was hard put to it to meet the rise in demand for vessels following the settled times of the Restoration, and there had to be large-scale buying of ships from abroad. However, two acts of Parliament put an end not only to foreign-owned ships carrying English trade (the familiar concept of the Cromwellian Navigation Acts), but also to the employment of foreign-built ships. The result was a speedy advance in native British ship-building. Even in wartime, British tonnage rose rather than fell, since the check to ship-building was more than balanced by the capture of foreign ships as prizes.23

  King Charles’ conception of England’s maritime role was also central to his relations with the Dutch.

  Charles II did not love the Dutch, or the ‘Hollanders’, as they were generally known by the English during this period. But he did not at first feel about them as he felt about the Scots, a visceral dislike based on personal ill-treatment. The Dutch had not treated him notably well during his exile, but then neither had France, Sweden nor Brandenburg, towards all of whom he was prepared to entertain friendly relations. Be it yachts or duck decoys, he was prepared to admire many things about their way of life and introduce them to his own country. If he was not prepared to dedicate himself to vengeance in England, he was still less inclined to the pursuit of old vendettas abroad.

  At his Restoration, King Charles accepted the congratulations of Johann De Witt, who, as Pensionary (Minister of State) of the province of Holland, represented the effective power in the Netherlands. When Mary Princess of Orange continued to press her own claims as guardian of the boy Prince William – as well as William’s possible rights as Stadtholder – she found her brother counselling moderation. At the start of his reign, King Charles certainly implied to De Witt that he was more interested in Dutch support for English policies than in his nephew’s claims.24

  Mary’s premature death in December 1660 (while on a visit to England) upset this equilibrium. From the grave, Mary still emphasized that proud rank of a Stuart princess to which she had paid such marked attention in life. Her brother and mother were left as joint-guardians of the eleven-year-old William, with no mention at all of the States of Holland. It was hardly surprising that the States refused to confirm the guardianship of a foreign monarch, whatever his blood relationship.

  Besides, there was still Mary’s old enemy, her mother-in-law, to be reckoned with. By early 1663 the Dowager Princess, who possessed the enormous advantage of being actually resident in the Netherlands, had seen the wisdom of joining forces with De Witt rather than fighting him over the boy’s future. She agreed to De Witt’s conditions for William’s education, and there was nothing the King and Council across the water in England could do about it.

  King Charles’ annoyance over the whole affair was in direct proportion to his rising anger with the Dutch on more fundamental matters. In this, as in his love of the sea, he echoed the prevailing emotion of his people.25 With the exception of certain Protestant leaders, who found the theology of their Dutch counterparts sympathetic, the English as a whole in the middle of the seventeenth century glared across the Channel at their Dutch neighbours as a dog surveys a rival dog across the way. And, like quarrelling dogs, the two countries could not resist from time to time having a go at each other.

  From the English point of view, this basic dislike made good commercial sense, since it was in commercial rivalry that it was rooted. The Dutch had in general the advantage of the English, being more adept at trade and having faster and cheaper ships: war offered the English an attractive alternative way of defeating them. For the Dutch cut across the English in certain vital areas: in Baltic trading, for example, and in distant lands, such as the West of Africa. Here a long-drawn-out struggle was already in progress for the possession of fortified trading-posts – the commodities traded to include of course slaves. … Communications were extraordinarily slow between the mercantile capital London and the fever-ridden swamps of Guinea, where the English and Dutch agents vied with each other, but they did exist. Elsewhere, in Asia, the policy of the East India Company was to try and secure equal trading rights, as well as compensation for past wrongs, from the Dutch. As the Dutch were clearly stronger than the English in Indian waters, it was once again in the interests of the Company to have the Dutch defeated in a European war.

  If it is an exaggeration to say that King Charles had at this stage a coherent economic policy, it is certainly an anachronism to say that he had a foreign one. Yet in so far as his instincts on the subject could be summed up in the early years of the reign, they were expressed by Thomas Mun in England’s Treasure by Foreign Trade, written in the 1620s and reprinted in 1664. Mun fulminated on the subject of the Dutch: all over the world, by their trading ‘they do hinder and destroy us in our lawful course of living, hereby taking bread out of our mouths’.26 This was a point of view shared by many of the King’s most vociferous subjects, for this was an area where courtiers and merchants alike were frequently joined in a would-be profitable commercial enterprise via a trading company.

  As King Charles came to share these feelings, he was further weighted against the Dutch not only by their threat to his beloved shipping, but also by his own natural preference for the French. The use of Madame as a conduit for correspondence with Louis XIV – ‘this private channel’ – arose naturally enough in the first place out of her marriage to the French King’s brother. Monsieur himself provided little competition for Charles as the central figure in his wife’s existence. It was not purely a question of his homosexuality: many princesses in that age lived perfectly happily with husbands whose proclivities lay elsewhere. Monsieur fulfilled his duties as a husband sufficiently frequently for Madame to endure numerous pregnancies and miscarriages during her short life. But he was a spiteful creature, jealous of Madame’s superior intelligence, her grace, and even the charm which otherwise enchanted the entire Court of Louis XIV. Burnet called him ‘poor spirited and voluptuous’ – a horrid combination.27

  In face of such unhappiness within her marriage, like a sunflower Madame turned elsewhere. A brief period of romantic dalliance with her brother-in-law Louis XIV (the true extent of which can only be guessed) established a warm and loving trust between them. Nevertheless, Charles remained the lodestone of her life. A visit to London before her marriage had confirmed the intimacy of 1659. The King’s love grew and deepened. As a result, Madame’s sway over him in political and religious matters has been much stressed. The King himself added to the legend by stating that Madame was the only woman who had ever had any influence over him. Bishop Burnet chimed in by stating that Charles could deny her nothing. Yet the hard evidence points to the reverse: it was the King who influenced Madame rather than the other way round.

  It is Madame whom we find in the Dutch War burning with English patriotism. ‘It is only with impatience that I can endure to see you defied by a small handful of wretches,’ she wrote to her brother. ‘This is perhaps pushing glory a little too far, but I cannot help it, and everyone has his own humour, and mine is to be very keenly alive to all your interests.’ An English observer in France thought Madame would literally have died at the news of an English reverse – all this from a Princess half-French by birth, brought up in France and married to a French prince. When Henriette-Anne visited England just after the Restoration with her mother, she had enchanted a deputation from the House of Commons with her tactful disposal of the fact that she could speak little of their allegedly common language. She had, she said, ‘an English heart’ if not ‘an English tongue’.28 One must believe that this violent partisanship sprang from her feelings for her brother.

  Such English sympathies of course only increased Madame’s value as an intermediary with Louis XIV. Gradually Charles’ letters were transformed from mere repositories of cosy family news to business letters – which nevertheless concluded, ‘I am entirely yours. C.’ Certainly Ma
dame was a far abler ambassadress for her native country than its official representative in Paris, the Presbyterian elder statesman, Lord Holles, who disliked the place. When Holles became involved in an absurd controversy over the precedence of his coach, Charles carefully upheld him in public for reasons of honour, but expected Madame to explain away his bêtise in private.

  Following the Restoration the King had already made his choice of France over Spain according to his personal inclination. This orientation became more obvious after the Cromwellian acquisition Dunkirk, occupying a key position between France and the Spanish Netherlands, was sold to the former. It was true that financial necessity played some part in Charles’ decision: quite apart from the high price paid by France (some £400,000), Dunkirk cost a fortune to maintain. But the drift of the English King’s diplomatic desires was clear, even without his anti-Spanish Portuguese marriage, so gratifying to France. Into these dreams, the Franco-Dutch defensive treaty of 1662 came as an unpleasant reminder of the French King’s priorities.

  It was a question of the future ownership of the Spanish Netherlands, which in itself formed part of the general problem of the Spanish succession. In 1660 Louis XIV had married another farthingaled Infanta, Maria Teresa, daughter of Philip IV of Spain by his first marriage to Elisabeth of France. At that point the acknowledged heir to the vast Spanish dominions was Philip’s only son Carlos, the fruit of his second marriage to an Austrian Hapsburg. Carlos was however congenitally retarded, probably as a result of too close intermarriage – his parents were first cousins. Such matches were not always disastrous – Maria Teresa and Louis XIV were first cousins, as were Madame and Monsieur. Both couples produced a line of descendants. But there was something unhealthy about the Hapsburg blood, which the luckier grandchildren of the vital Henri Quatre escaped. At any rate, it was always clear that Carlos would die childless, despite the fact that he was an unconscionable time doing so (in the phrase associated with Charles II): he survived until 1700.

  It was much less clear who would succeed him. The Infanta Maria Teresa specifically renounced her own claim on her marriage: but at the death of her father in 1665 Louis found it easy to discover that the renunciation was void, since the other clauses of the marriage treaty had not been carried out. Even before this there was a continuing sense of crisis about the Spanish dominions, particularly ones so carefully designed, surely, to round off the French frontiers, so strategically placed for French invasion, as the Spanish Netherlands. As early as December 1661 letters from France were warning Clarendon, for example, that ‘the King of France, when the King of Spain [Philip IV] dies, will send an army into Flanders to seize the country in the right of his wife’.29

  Under the circumstances, Louis XIV looked on Holland less as England’s commercial rival than as Flanders’ potentially aggressive neighbour. King Charles was left to try and form a Northern league whereby the tiresome Hollanders would be confronted by a united Scandinavian phalanx. Sir Gilbert Talbot was sent on a mission to Copenhagen, but the project broke down on another traditional rivalry, that of Denmark and Sweden. This move, coupled with a partial (and unsuccessful) raid on the Dutch at Bergen, shows how far the King’s anti-Dutch feelings were escalating.fn1 He was probably speaking the truth when he told Madame in September 1664 that he did not desire war – ‘almost the only man in his kingdom’ who did not. He further described himself as lacking the ‘brutal appetite’ which induces rulers to break the peace.31 That again had a recognizable ring. Brutal appetites in general had been eliminated by the claustrophobic years of exile, the perpetual need for self-control.

  But lack of passion is in itself an ineffective weapon, particularly when confronted by zeal. Most of the Court and Parliament were full of contempt for the Hollanders – avid for personal gain – and were, in Pepys’ phrase, ‘mad for a Dutch war’.32 If the King had been firmly convinced of the foolishness of such an enterprise, he might have been able to combat the wave of nationalist feeling. As it was, it coincided with his own deep hopes for English maritime ascendancy. Moreover, Charles was still in the same cautious mood of his Restoration Day, aware how quickly fortunes could change. It was always easier to go with the crowd.

  Besides, he trusted – no, he believed – the English would prove superior to the Hollanders. In this conviction, and in the subsequent débâcle, the role of the English envoy at The Hague, Sir George Downing, was crucial. Originally a Puritan businessman, Downing was one of those adept characters who had ridden the storm of the Restoration period, to glide smoothly from his position as envoy under Cromwell to that of the King’s ambassador. In many ways he was worthy of the post, being highly intelligent and energetic – taking a lot of trouble, for instance, to acquire copies of letters from the Dutch archives.

  But Downing had a failing. He was arrogant, and his arrogance took the form of such a low estimate of the Dutch national character that he ended by seriously misleading his own country. Again and again Downing reassured the King and Council that, whatever happened, the Dutch simply would not fight. ‘Go on in Guinea,’ he confidently advised. ‘If you bang them there, they will be very tame.’33

  Pepys showed infinitely more percipience than Downing, the man-on-the-spot, when he confided to his Diary at the end of April 1664, ‘All the news now is what will become of the Dutch business, whether war or peace. We all seem to desire it, as thinking ourselves to have advantages at present over them; but for my part I dread it.’34

  Downing’s assurances were music to the pro-war party in England, who saw in a series of predatory raids on the passive Dutch in Africa the opportunity of still further gains at little cost to themselves. The war party included not only the East India Company lobby but the Duke of York, with his special interest in the Navy, Buckingham – possessed, as ever, of more personal influence than his character warranted – and Barbara Castlemaine, whose importance lay not so much in the influence she exerted over Charles, as in the influence she was presumed to exert by outsiders. From Africa House, the Admiralty and Navy offices there emitted powerful signals for war.

  Fighting broke out during the winter of 1663–4, in Africa, where the English enjoyed success, and America, where the New Netherlands were seized. Nearer at hand in the Channel, the English fleet acquired a series of Dutch ships as prizes, victories which neatly combined prestige and profit. Downing’s prognostications of glory appeared to be triumphantly justified.

  In the autumn of 1664 the King still hesitated. Part of his vacillation was due to a laudable desire to be sure that the Navy was suitably prepared. The work of Sir William Coventry, Secretary to James and one of the Commissioners to the Navy, was however beaver-like in its application. On the eve of the war the two navies were at least comparable in strength.

  The King’s hesitancy was also in part a propaganda exercise. King Charles was understandably keen to woo King Louis away from the side of the Dutch, to whom the latter was only committed by a defensive, not an offensive, treaty. To achieve this it was necessary in propaganda terms to prove that the Dutch, not the English, were the assailants. King Charles sent to Madame a series of long letters hammering the point home from the summer of 1664 onwards: how the bellicosity of the Dutch was being – surely unintentionally – encouraged by the French King.

  ‘For I assure you, they brag very much already of his friendship,’ Charles told Madame in August; without Louis XIV’s support, ‘it may be they would not be so insolent as they are’. In September he wrote of the Dutch preparations, ‘I am resolved they shall now send first, that all the world may see I do not desire to begin with them, and that if there comes any mischief by it, they have drawn it upon their own heads.’ In October he described almost casually the capture of one Dutch possession on the East coast of America: ‘A very good town, but we have got the better of it, and ’tis now called New York.’ Even here he made it clear the town ‘did belong to England heretofore’. In late December he was sending her a printed paper, ‘which will clearly inform
you of the state of the quarrel between me and Holland, by which you will see that they are the aggressors and the breakers of the peace, and not me’. He asked Madame to read it carefully, for he was sure that the Dutch Ambassador in Paris would use ‘all sorts of arts’ to ‘make us seem the aggressors’.35

  But King Louis did not budge.

  Already by November the sheer aggression of ordinary Englishmen, and of Members of Parliament in particular, towards the Dutch was making it difficult for the King to continue his delaying tactics much longer. As he admitted to Madame in September, ‘the truth is they [the Dutch] have not great need to provoke this nation, for except myself I believe there is scarce an Englishman that does not desire passionately a war with them’. On 24 November the King gave vent to a calculatedly patriotic speech to Parliament on the subject of his preparations for war: ‘If I had proceeded more slowly, I should have exposed my own honour and the honour of the nation, and should have seemed not confident of your affections.’36

  It was significant that the King also had to dismiss as ‘a vile jealousy’ the rumour that he might graciously accept the war subsidy now voted by Parliament, and then, having made a sudden peace, turn it to his own uses. War did pose an acute financial problem to a Crown already heavily embarrassed. It was true that the nationalistic optimism which pervaded the period, in the matter of this Dutch War, made light of such difficulties: Dutch prizes were expected to compensate for military costs. But so notoriously unstable were the King’s finances by now, that he found the greatest difficulty in raising the actual cash needed in the first place. New remedies were desperately sought. Sir George Downing had always advocated the punctual payment of interest on Treasury loans to uphold the King’s credit, but this had not always been done – because it had not always been possible to do it. This was the occasion of the issue of a government fiduciary currency; those who advanced the King money were for the first time enabled to obtain repayment ‘in course’, that is in rotation as funds reached the Exchequer.37 Thus inevitably expenditure galloped ahead of revenue. Even so, people were reluctant to lend for the Dutch War – at eight or ten per cent interest. They might cheer the brave British sailors and shake their fists at the cowardly Dutch. But when it came to the deployment of funds, the government’s finances were not such as to inspire any kind of confidence among the hard-headed.