King Charles II

by Fraser, Antonia

  If Ireland gave out little hard news, by the end of 1672 there was plenty of news in London. The London Gazette would shortly be reporting the recall of Parliament. Failing to secure his peace with William of Orange, Charles II was left with the impossibility of sailing his fleet the following spring without money to hand. The royal expenses display the nature of the preparations. Hay, two whole loads of it, was ordered for stuffing the seats, sacks and benches in the Parliamentary chambers. Two pairs of tongs – ‘handsome and serviceable’ – were acquired, as was a pillow of down for the Lord Chancellor. Candlesticks had to be got and that ever-present expense of the time, close-stools (nine of them). Green baize was to be employed in quantity, so that the seats in the House of Commons could be ‘new repaired’. More green baize was to be used for window curtains for ‘H.M.’s service’.27

  The fact was that this session of February 1673 contained a crucial appeal by the King for money for his ‘important, necessary and expensive war’, and an equally crucial rejection of that appeal by both Commons and Lords. Where Charles spoke emotionally of his ships, and the contest into which he dared to say that he had been ‘forced’, the Commons clamoured furiously to have the Declaration of Indulgence of the previous year withdrawn. Only Parliament, they reiterated, could suspend the penal laws. The King first prevaricated; then equivocated. Referring to ‘his power in ecclesiastics’, he assured the Commons that he never had any thoughts of using it otherwise than as it had been ‘entrusted’ to him, for the peace and establishment of the Church of England, and ‘the ease of all his subjects in general’. He had no thought, he declared, of ‘avoiding or precluding the advice of Parliament’.28

  Wriggle as the King might, he could not avoid the tight hold of the Parliamentary pincers in which the demands of his war had placed him. He tried in vain to appeal to the House of Lords, whose relations with the Commons were at the time sufficiently acrimonious for him to hope for better things from their assembly. He continued to put the most comforting gloss on what he had done: ‘My Lords and Gentlemen: if there be any scruple remaining with you concerning the suspension of penal laws, I here faithfully promise you that what hath been done in that particular shall not for the future be drawn either into consequence or example.’ But the Lords would not support him. In the end the King was obliged to withdraw the Declaration in return for an assessment of £70,000 a month for three years.

  It was a galling defeat.

  There was worse to come. Immediately after their triumph the Commons pressed through a Test Act. This measure was as divisive as Charles’ Declaration of Indulgence had been potentially healing. Every holder of office had to take public communion in the Church of England. Furthermore, various oaths of allegiance were framed, as well as a declaration concerning the doctrine of transubstantiation; together they formed a test, in the truest sense of the word, which it was impossible for an sincere Catholic to pass. Once again, the King found himself in no position to combat the challenge.

  Bowing his head before the storm, a familiar posture, he gave his assent to the Test Act on 29 March. The consequences were felt at once. The Duke of York and Thomas Clifford both failed to take Anglican communion at Easter. The Duke laid down his post as Lord High Admiral in June. Clifford also resigned as Lord Treasurer – to die shortly afterwards. The King took refuge in one of those pieces of ‘raillery’. He was heard to say that he would purge his Court of all Catholics except his barber ‘whom he meant to keep in despite of all their bills, for he was so well accustomed to his hand’. The joke was a pointed one: if a Catholic could be trusted with a razor so near the royal person, his co-religionists could hardly be the cut-throats of popular imagination.29

  How prescient had proved the words of the Duke of York two years before! In the summer of 1673 it was even more difficult to see how a King and a Parliament could ‘subsist together’ for very long. Inevitably, the King prorogued Parliament once more. He was alleged to have observed that he would rather be a poor King than no King….30 But the long war of attrition between King and Parliament was in fact gathering new momentum.

  1 In its original sense of harlot; the secondary meaning of rotten, revived in the present day, came later.

  2 Although in some respects it was in advance of the English Army. Kilmainham Hospital provided the model for Chelsea Hospital for veteran and wounded soldiers.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Knot in the Comb

  ‘This knot will again return to the teeth of the comb and never disentangle itself unless the King take courage to combat the licence of Parliament.’

  The Venetian Ambassador, 1674

  It was the presumed connection of Catholicism with royal absolutism which dominated the politics of the next few years. The installation of a young French Catholic mistress might be shrugged off with a worldly air, although the rumour that Charles II and Louise were secretly married by a Catholic rite showed how far suspicion could desert sense – a Catholic rite was the last thing which could have united the King and his mistress during the lifetime of Catharine of Braganza. The genuine marriage plans of the Duke of York to a Catholic princess were quite a different matter. Anne Duchess of York died in March 1671 and thereafter James looked around for a new wife. These plans followed a joint venture with the French of increasing unpopularity. Meanwhile the absolutist French government across the water aroused fears that the King himself might be contemplating something similar.

  Charles II strenuously denied the connection of Catholicism and absolutism, for the good reason that the two were not connected in his own mind. The rise of Catholicism in England was in fact a chimera. Like many popular scares, statistics show that it had no foundation. The numbers of Catholics in the country were actually declining, as they had been declining throughout the century and would continue to do.fn1 They were a persecuted and depressed body, given an artificial appearance of strength and spirit by three factors. First, like immigrants in our own day, they tended to group together, so that they could share a priest without too much loss of security. Wolverhampton, for example, was termed ‘a little Rome’. Secondly, there was a link in the popular imagination between Catholicism and the Army. This had some basis in the original Royalist armies, where Catholics from Ireland and elsewhere found employment. And Catholics continued to serve in the Army (although officers were excluded by the Test Act), particularly in campaigns and outposts abroad. The standing army of Charles II was always subject to keen and worried scrutiny: the association of the Catholics and the Army made for a vicious circle of apprehension.2

  Thirdly, as has been stressed, the characters boldly lit up on the public stage of the Court were beginning to have a Catholic air. Or, as Evelyn put it, the ‘fopperies of the Papists’ were now coming out in the open.3 To the suspicious country, the Court appeared to be going rapidly Catholic – a disastrous state of affairs.

  The King continued to view these matters from quite a different angle. Since Worcester, he had seen the poorer Catholics in their true light as essentially loyal, if unhappy, creatures. It was a point of view he had twice tried to impose on the law of the land by repealing the penal laws, without success. When he drew up the Army at Blackheath in the autumn of 1673, it was a gesture widely interpreted as menacing towards the capital. But no evidence has ever been found that Charles II intended to parody in such a way the actions (and mistakes) of his predecessor Cromwell – let alone use his standing army as a Popish instrument.4 He made nothing of the Catholic air of the Court: he breathed it with enjoyment, but to him it did not reek of absolutism. Because this connection between Catholicism and absolutism did not exist, he seemed unable to grasp that it played a part in the suspicions of Parliament. To the extent that he was unwilling to check his brother’s Catholic marriage plans, Charles set up an intricate tangle for himself in the autumn of 1673.

  The political scene was further complicated by the mounting intrigues of William of Orange, to bring about that separate peace with England,
cutting off France, on which he had set his heart. His plan was to concentrate on the manifestly weak link in the chain of the King’s pro-French foreign policy – the House of Commons. Various agents were employed, principal amongst them Peter Du Moulin. A code language evolved in which, for example, the King was known as ‘Mr Young’, the Duke of York ‘Mr Cook’ and the Catholics ‘the Stone-Chandlers’. It was Du Moulin, a man of devious yet lucid intelligence, who had first pointed out to the Dutch prince that England was setting her compass in the direction of France. In his report on the subject, he had underestimated the personal control of Charles II over the nation’s affairs. Nevertheless, his original plan of sowing dissension amongst the various members of the Cabal, while at the same time emphasizing the threat of France to the House of Commons, could hardly be said to have failed.5

  Even if he had misunderstood the wide powers remaining with the King – and who did understand the disposition of power between King and Parliament at this point? – it was perfectly true that by the summer of 1673 the King’s ministers were in demonstrable disarray. Dutch money was also dispensed with a generosity not usually associated with a country described by an English statesman later as ‘offering too little and taking too much’. Perhaps most of it was spent on satirical pamphlets and other pieces of sordid but carefully aimed abuse, rather than on paying the English MPs on a large scale. Nevertheless, the presence of Dutch largesse on any scale provides a sardonic counterpart to the King’s own reception of French subsidies. It was an age when political purses somehow existed on a very different level from political principles.

  The Catholic marriage project of the Duke of York was an open invitation to the Dutch-inspired satirists to spread their calculated venom. In his search for a bride, one of the Duke’s aims was to provide himself with a male heir whose claims to the succession would supersede those of his two surviving daughters Mary and Anne, now eleven and eight respectively. But the Duke, who was showing himself almost as convincing a womanizer as his brother, also paid a particular attention to his future wife’s appearance: as he approached forty, his taste ran to young and beautiful girls.

  It was ironic that James’s first choice, the widowed Susan Lady Belasyse, was actually a Protestant: and he selected her for the good reason that he was much in love with her. Charles made short work of the project. James, he said, had made a fool of himself once and was not to be allowed to do so again. He had in mind a foreign princess who would bring some prestige and power in her train, even some money, rather than a mere Englishwoman. As for love, it was Charles who dismissed the whole notion of marrying with that in mind – one could get used to anyone’s face in a week, he remarked.6 Charles’ witticism that his brother’s mistresses were so plain that they must have been imposed on him by his confessors as a penance is sometimes quoted as evidence of James’ general boorishness – there is something very unattractive about having a positive taste for plain women. Anne Hyde was undoubtedly plain, but perhaps this early experience gave James a good fright. For Lely made of James’ post-Restoration mistress Lady Chesterfield a doe-like creature with nothing plain about her. The evidence of this quest for a bride is also very much to the contrary: it is Charles who concentrates on the worldly position of the lady, James who anxiously queries her physical attributes.7

  A taste for pretty girls was really James’ only vice: unless you took into account that sinister rigidity, increasing with the years, remarked on earlier. Gradually the brave, bluff Duke of York was being moulded by circumstances and age into the future James II. His appearance had altered markedly from the slender, thoughtful youth he was in exile. By the mid-1660s he had become ‘all fat and ruddy and lusty’ from the sun and air aboard ship.8 James’ character had also expanded, strengthened and hardened. His courage was turned in another direction. Buckingham’s clever saying of the King and the Duke, that Charles could see things if he would and James would see things if he could, contained a kernel of truth, as such aphorisms often do, albeit simplified. The trouble was that the things James did see were the need for ‘Papistry’ and ‘arbitrary government’– matters with which most English people were quite out of sympathy.

  Having adopted his Catholicism ‘with full deliberation’, he could not imagine himself abandoning it, ‘though I were sure it would restore me into the good opinion and esteem of the nation which I once had’, as he told Laurence Hyde (Clarendon’s son) in 1681. His great-grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots, had made the same kind of proud declaration when urged to embrace the Protestant religion to please Queen Elizabeth: ‘Constancy becometh all folks well, and none better than princes, … and specially in matters of religion.’9 However admirable, it was a very different spirit from that of Henri Quatre – and Charles II.

  His religion was only one aspect of his development. James had also acquired a youthful conviction of the rightness of absolutist government from his years in the French Army – here, if anywhere, was the connection of Catholicism and absolutism feared by his brother’s Parliamentary critics. It is sometimes forgotten, in stressing French influences of all sorts on Charles II, from the political to the literary, that he was expelled from the country in 1654. In no sense did he return from France to England in 1660. James, on the other hand, both spent more of his exile in direct touch with French influences and had happier memories of the experience.

  The Duke of York was also, understandably, a stern advocate of the legitimate succession. In 1675 he made a significant remark to the French Ambassador: Queen Elizabeth, he said, had been as much of a usurper as Cromwell. This alluded to Elizabeth’s birth, which by Catholic standards was illegitimate, and left Mary Queen of Scots as the proper sovereign of England by her legitimate Tudor descent. The Duke of York clearly intended the same standards to prevail a hundred years later. On another occasion Admiral Tromp told him not to worry about his lack of a son, since England had been well ruled by women. James replied tartly that the reign of Queen Elizabeth had been ‘the worst reign since the Conquest’.10 He referred here as much to the growth of Parliamentary liberty as to her bastard birth. As the Duke of York fired off on the subject of Elizabeth the disaster, the English people were busy celebrating her Accession Day with increasing Protestant fervour. It was a symbolic contrast.

  Over his impending marriage, the Duke of York certainly displayed all the resolution for which one alternately admires and condemns him. The King’s choice had been an Austrian archduchess; but she was wrested from James’ grasp when the Emperor, finding himself unexpectedly a widower, promptly made the archduchess his own. The plain Princess of Neuburg was banned by James – to Charles’ amazement – and Charles himself banned a Princess of Württemberg, either because he continued to dislike princesses of ‘cold Northern countries’ or for the more rational reason that she had a trouble-making mother.

  There was a certain haste over the enquiries, because James at least was determined to marry before the autumn, when Parliament was due to reconvene. He was under no illusion as to what their reactions would be to the kind of Catholic match he now had in mind. When word came of the availability of two Princesses of Modena, the fifteen-year-old Mary Beatrice and her thirty-year-old aunt, James’ marital pulse raced – particularly when he learnt that these pious Catholic ladies would be backed up by substantial payments from Louis XIV. For Modena lay within the French interest: Mary Beatrice’s mother had been a niece of Cardinal Mazarin. In the end, reports of Mary Beatrice’s beauty – ‘her hair black as jet’ and her graceful figure – as well as her tender age, inclined the Duke of York towards her. The proxy marriage was performed on 20 September with Lord Peterborough acting the part of the groom.11

  When the news was made public, the uproar was immense. It became the violent concern of Parliament to fend off this marriage with ‘the daughter of the Pope’, as Mary Beatrice was unkindly termed, before it could actually be consummated.

  Shaftesbury in particular was vociferous in his opposition. In any case, this
strange, warped and talented politician was veering towards more public opposition to the King, and his days as Lord Chancellor were clearly numbered. Admittedly, he had voted for the Declaration of Indulgence, but he had also, like Arlington, voted for the Test Act. Like Arlington, he was on increasingly hostile terms with the Duke of York as a result, and by the autumn was reported to be unable to sit at the same Council Table with him. At the same time, the balance of power in the King’s inner councils altered.

  In June 1673 Thomas Osborne was made Lord High Treasurer: he was also created Lord Latimer, and the next year Earl of Danby (by which name he will in future be designated). Danby’s contemporaries did not bother their heads with jealousy, cynically supposing that in view of the state of the economy the post of Lord High Treasurer was calculated to ruin anyone.12 But the rise of Danby, a firm Anglican, a supporter of the Triple Alliance, and a man obstinately determined to put the King’s finances on a better footing, was in fact the most hopeful thing which had happened to Charles II, domestically, for several years, although its full effects would not be felt immediately.

  The angry chaos provoked by the news of the Duke of York’s match remained. Charles, as so often before when under pressure, took refuge in delay. On the one hand, he withdrew his offer of the public chapel of St James to Mary Beatrice: she would have to make do with a private one. The Queen was made to claim the St James’ chapel in order to gloss over the affront. On the other hand, Charles put off the summoning of Parliament for a crucial week, hoping that in the meantime Mary Beatrice would arrive in the country and the marriage would be duly consummated before any further protests could be heard.